ABSTRACT
Lenin consolidated Bolshevik power by a mixture of reform and force-in theory the dictatorship of the proletariat, in practice the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party. Within months the capital had been moved back to Moscow, peace concluded with Germany, the liberal apparatus of the Provisional government period dismantled, and the country turned away from the Westernising tendency of the previous 220 years towards a new, more Eurasian path of authoritarian rule and state socialist development of the whole empire. Unable to prevent the elections to the Constituent Assembly, Lenin broke up the chamber which resulted from them, for it was dominated by the Social Revolutionaries, the mainly peasant-backed democratic Marxist party. Yet so great was the political apathy of most Russians that there was little reaction to this destruction of their new-found political liberty. The average peasant or worker Russian was more concerned with problems of survival, and many of the upper and middle class were in full flight abroad.
