How Did Lenin Come To Power In Russia

In the aftermath of the previous February Revolution, there was power sharing between the weak Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. The October Revolution was a much more calculated event, orchestrated by a small group of people: the Bolsheviks. Led by Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks launched a coup d'état against the Provisional Government and seized power, occupying strategic locations such as government buildings and forming a new government with Lenin as its head. The October Revolution was a watershed in Russian history, affecting Russia's economy, society, culture, international politics and industrial development. Russia's new leaders were drawn mainly from the intellectual and working classes rather than from the aristocracy.

To put this into context, Lenin was aware that the Provisional Government's willingness to continue Russia's participation in the war contributed to its unpopularity. His promise of peace can therefore be seen as a way of consolidating Bolshevik power in Russia, as well as offering a different vision of foreign policy from the Provisional Government and Russia's Tsarist past. However, this source does not paint a full picture of Russia's exit from the war. In actuality, Russia's formal exit from the war was politically complicated and expensive for the Bolsheviks. Negotiations for a peace treaty began in December 1917, headed by Leon Trotsky and German and Austrian representatives. Trotsky had tried to stall negotiations, hoping that a socialist revolution would break out in Germany before signing a treaty that could potentially involve granting territory to the Central Powers. In his autobiography My Life

The CHEKA, the Bolshevik secret police headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, targeted any individual or group deemed to be a threat to Bolshevik power, including Tsarists, liberals, non-Bolshevik socialists and kulaks (wealthy peasants). This could be said to be a practical implementation of the Marxist concept of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. As explained by Lenin in The State and Revolution (1917), "the supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution." The utility of this source is that it lays the groundwork for political action, shaping the character of Bolshevik politics (owing to Lenin's leadership). Thus, Krasnaya Gazeta, a pro-Bolshevik newspaper, announced the start of the Red Terror on 1st September 1918: "We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky, Zinoviev and Volodarski, let