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The next day, Nov. 8, Lenin appeared before the Congress of Soviets, rejected all talk of a socialist coalition government and insisted on an all- Bolshevik Cabinet. He became Premier, with Trotsky as Foreign Minister. This was not because the Bolsheviks were the biggest or most popular party. In elections for a constituent assembly, they won only 25% of the votes, in contrast to about 62% for various moderate socialist groups, notably the peasant-backed Socialist Revolutionaries, and 13% for various bourgeois parties. Dismissing that as a "formal, juridical" matter, Lenin simply disbanded the constituent assembly after one meeting. And in 1918 he banned all parties other than his own, which he had renamed the Communist Party.
In taking such high-handed actions, Lenin now had the weapon of a new police force known as the Cheka, which authorized local soviets to "arrest and shoot immediately" all members of "counterrevolutiona ry organizations." When a Socialist Revolutionary named Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin in the neck, the Cheka rounded up and executed 500 of her party comrades in one night. Lenin's view: "We have never renounced and cannot renounce terror." As for the future role of the Communists, the Eighth Party Congress decreed in 1919 that "the Russian Communist Party should master for itself undivided political supremacy in the soviets and practical supervision over all their work."
But governing a disintegrating nation was difficult. Although Trotsky made peace with the Germans in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Berlin's price was the separation from Russia of Poland, the Baltic states and the Ukraine. British and French troops landed in Murmansk to keep Russian supplies out of German hands. Various anti-Bolshevik "White" armies sprang up in the south and in Siberia. Japanese and American troops landed in Vladivostok.
By the time all those forces were pushed back or negotiated away, the Soviets' hastily nationalized and collectivized economy was a shambles. By 1920 industrial production had dropped to about 15% of the prewar level; runaway inflation had made the ruble nearly worthless; foreign trade had plummeted to almost zero. Peasants whose crops were requisitioned for the cities began hiding their harvests or not harvesting at all, and in 1921 famine killed uncounted millions.
Confronted with this disaster, Lenin zigzagged. According to the New Economic Policy inaugurated in 1921, private enterprise was once again permitted, farmers could keep or sell more of their crops, overtime pay was restored, a new state bank reformed the currency (sound familiar?). Predictably enough, improvements soon followed -- production up, trade up. But in this ambiguous moment of success, Lenin suffered a stroke. He struggled to stay at his post, to finish his work, but two more strokes increasingly paralyzed him, and after 22 months of decline, he died in 1924, at only 53.