he Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 one of the first actions of the new regime was to end Russian involvement in the Great War. The signing of the Brest-Litovsk pact in March 1918 angered the allies because it meant that the Bolsheviks were going back on the Tsarist and Provisional Government's policies of continuing the war against the Germans. This lead to the landing of Allied troops in Russia to support the 'White' anti - Bolshevik, counter - revolutionary armies. This, in turn lead to the setting up of the 'Red' army. The Soviet secret police, or Cheka, was not a product of the civil war itself, it had been set up in December 1917. The role of the secret police changed though during the civil war into, as Fitzpatrick puts it an,"..organ of terror, dispensing summary justice including executions, making mass arrests,..".From this we can see that the fledgling Socialist regime which promised freedoms from the repressions of the Tsarist days acting was acting in a repressive way itself under Lenin. However under Lenin in 1918 and the first half of 1919 in the region of 8,389 people were executed by the Cheka, this must be contrasted to Stalin's regime when, during the terror of the 1930s, according to Bullock, "..up to eight million were executed or died in 1937-8, leaving six million still in jail or camps at the beginning of 1939."The figures speak for themselves and illustrate how much more repressive the Stalinist system was only twenty years later. `In the aftermath of the October revolution the Bolsheviks tried to nationalise the Russian economy along communist lines. On of the facets of this was the requisitioning of grain in the countryside to feed the cities because of poor transport and trading systems. The government decreed that all grain above that which was needed for re-planting and personal consumption was to be handed over to the state at a fixed price. Local 'Committees of Poor Peasants' were set up to over...
