nly socialist steps such as the nationalization of banks. The Provisional Governments commitment to the war effort was denounced. Four decrees were put into action. The first four from the Bolshevik Revolutionary Legislation were a decree on peace, a decree on land, a decree on the suppression of hostile newspapers, and a declaration of the rights of the peoples of Russia (Stossenger, 130). By early 1918 the Bolshevik critics individually made their peace with Lenin, and were accepted back into the party and governmental leadership. At the same time, the Left and Soviet administration thus acquired the exclusively Communist character which it has had ever since. The Left SR's like the right SR's and the Mensheviks, continued to function in the soviets as a more or less legal opposition until the outbreak of large-scale civil war in the middle of 1918. At that point the opposition parties took positions which were either equally vocal or openly anti-Bolshevik, and one after another, they were suppressed. The Eastern Front had been relatively quiet during 1917, and shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution a temporary armistice was agreed upon. Peace negotiations were then begun at the Polish town of Brest-Litovsk, behind the German lines. In agreement with their earlier anti-imperialist line, the Bolshevik negotiators, headed by Trotsky, used the talks as a discussion for revolutionary propaganda, while most of the party expected the eventual return of war in the name of revolution. Lenin startled his followers in January of 1918 by explicitly demanding that the Soviet republic meet the German conditions and conclude a formal peace in order to win what he regarded as an indispensable breathing spell, instead of shallowly risking the future of the revolution (Daniels, 135). Trotsky resigned as Foreign Commissar during the Brest- Litovsk crisis, but he was immediately appointed Commissar of M...
