What measures were taken by the Bolsheviks to maintain power and address Russia’s problems before the outbreak of Civil War in the summer of 1918?
... as easy as you might think because the party was split, Lenin wanted peace, Trotsky wanted neither peace nor war and Bukharin wanted to turn the war into a revolutionary war. But on 3rd March 1918 the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed between Germany and Russia due to pressure from Lenin, but at the severe cost of Russian land; they lost 1 sixth of their population (62 million), 27% of farm land, 26% of railway lines and 74% of iron ore and coal reserves, the consequences were upset patriotic Russians and giving away land meant all types of people were upset leading to people joining anti-Bolshevik parties. To solve the problem of peasants taking land the Bolsheviks passed the Land Decree, this gave peasants the right to take over the land for themselves without any stigma, and then to decide for themselves how to divide it up, this was not what the Bolsheviks wanted since private ownership wasn’t in their socialist vision but since the peasants were doing this anyway they could hardly oppose it, in this method the land belonged to the ‘entire people’. This was the best way to maintain power, as it did not upset the peasants who accounted for the majority of the population. When it came to the issue of whether to share power or not Lenin had his mind clearly made up, although strong opposition meant that forming a coalition could be the best idea Lenin believed that the only way forward was to rule with one party, instead he set up the Council of the people’s commissars or the Sovnarcom, which functioned as the acting Bolshevik government. The next way forward was to deal with opposition parties, the first movement was the opposition press banned since they knew what a problems aggressive opposition papers could bring them. After the Constituent Assembly, which Lenin had allowed to go ahead, many people believed that the Bolsheviks should hand the state over to the Socialist Revolutionaries since they won by a massive proportion; instead the Bolsheviks merely ignored the results and faced the next targets of opposition, Leading Kadets, SR’s and Mensheviks were imprisoned clearly stating that the Bolsheviks were not giving up without a fight, after a while the opposition was weak and so was ideal for Bolsheviks to maintain power since there was no force strong enough to co-ordinate an attack. The next move was the forming of the Cheka, this group was made up of members of the Red Guard and some military numbers they were also known as the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, so basically they were set up at the Bolshevik’s own private police force and apart from terrorising the opposition and defending the Bolsheviks they also provided an effective force for dealing with violence on any measure. From there they were able to overcome the problem of civil servant strikes by arresting most of the civil service and employing Bolshevik officials in their place. The way they dealt with the lack of peasant support was to encourage peasant warfare; using the Cheka he intimidated middle-class people or bourgeois and portrayed them as enemies of the st...