Difficulties in early Sovnarkom

Dates

20 November 1917
- they had to use Red Guards to access State Bank money.

2 December 1917
- Signing of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk

2 December 1917
- Vesenkha was placed. It was the Supreme Council of the National Economy to manage workers

7th December 1917
- Cheka was created to deal with counter revolutionaries
- Cossaks crushing 10k revolutionaries but defeated, supported Keresnky
- A "temperorary response"
- Modest powers to invetigate to start with

Feb 1918
- Cheka now had power to arrest imprisonment.
- increased German hostility, threat of a re-war.

21 Feb 1918
- Decree passed abt it

Primary Quotes

"The whole city was infected by the drinking madness."
- Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, describing the fire brigade, drink pogroms

"Each day of drunkenness brings the other side closer to victory and us to the old slavery."
- Trotsky

"You are the power: do all you want to do, take all you want. We shall support you, but take care of production, see that production is useful."
- Lenin

Historian Quotes

"In a sense, Sovankarnkom was a wing of the Bolshevik Party."
- Lynch

"A better organised and more efficient form of the Okhrana."
- Lynch, abt the Cheka

"Ideals of empowerment and mass-revolutionary participation went hand-in-hand with discipline and coercion."
- Tom Ryan

"The Bolsheviks inherited a collapsing economy."
- Tom Ryan

"The holding of power by the Bolsheviks was a far greater achievement than the taking of it."
- Historian William Chamblerlin