The Soviet Union 949

The White army executes suspected Bolsheviks during the Civil War.

lution in Germany. The Treaty of Riga in March 1921 ended the hostilities
between Poland and the new Soviet government, which had been largely at
the expense of Ukraine. While much of Ukraine was left within the Soviet
Union, 5 million Ukrainians now found themselves living in Poland.

The Soviet Union

The Revolution seemed to offer peasants in Russia hope. After destroying
the authority of the imperial regime in the countryside, they then broke the
power of the landlords. Many peasants feared the Whites, and they there­
fore went along with the demands of the Soviet regime, hoping that “peace
and land” would follow. The Bolsheviks were able to install a centralized
state authority to mobilize the countryside against the counter-revolution.
Like the old imperial elites, the Bolsheviks mistrusted the peasants, their
notions of family and village ownership of land, their sense of collective
responsibility, and their eagerness to market what they produced. The Civil
War established a precedent for the use of mass terror to enforce the party’s
will in rural areas. Gradually, Bolshevik commissars reestablished Bolshevik
authority over Ukraine and border lands such as Georgia and Turkistan.
A constitution promulgated in July 1918 promised freedom of speech and
assembly, as well as the separation of church and state. The “dictatorship of
the proletariat” became that of the Bolsheviks. Marxist theory promised the
“withering of the state” once socialism had been constructed, and Lenin
himself warned against the growing power of the bureaucracy, which he
had helped create. But the Soviet state did anything but wither.