Civil war and the birth of the Soviet Union

To free the new Bolshevik government from World War I entirely, Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, accepting harsh terms and surrendering huge amounts of territory to Germany -- a steep price for peace. The former royal family was executed in July 1918, removing any figurehead around which monarchists could rally. From 1918 to 1922, Russia was consumed by civil war between the Reds (the Bolsheviks, whose Red Army was organized by Trotsky) and the Whites (a loose, often disorganized coalition of monarchists, liberals, and other anti-Bolshevik forces, aided by limited intervention from Allied powers including Britain, France, and the United States, who feared communism's spread). The Reds' more unified leadership and control of Russia's industrial heartland eventually won out by 1922-1923. During the war, the Bolsheviks imposed "War Communism," seizing grain and nationalizing industry by force; once the fighting ended, Lenin pulled back with the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, allowing small businesses and some market activity to help the shattered economy recover.

In 1922, the victorious Bolsheviks formally created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). When Lenin died in 1924, a power struggle broke out among his potential successors, and Joseph Stalin, who had built a quiet but powerful base controlling the Communist Party's internal bureaucracy, gradually outmaneuvered his rivals -- most notably Leon Trotsky, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and later assassinated on Stalin's orders in Mexico in 1940. By the late 1920s, Stalin held undisputed control over the USSR, setting the stage for the totalitarian state you will examine in more depth later this course.