>> Well, the American revolutionaries were supported by
>> a minority too --
>> about 1/3 of the pop.
>>
>> If there was so little support for the bolshies why
>> was it such a quiet
>> revolution? Why did the civil war have to be
>> fomented by outside powers?
>> Why did the bolshies win the civil war?
>>
>> I am not an expert but I hazily remember that the
>> twenties was an era of
>> high hopes in the USSR.
Chris:
> I am not an expert either, but my impression (which
> may be totally wrong) is that the Bolsheviks had the
> support of large chunks of the urban proletariat...The peasantry and lots
> of other people
> were turned off by the Civil War and War Communism.
=======================
The Bolsheviks had (democratically) won a majority of the delegates in the
Petrograd and Moscow Soviets towards the end of the summer of 1917, and it
was evident that their support in the military and peasantry was also
increasing rapidly. This gave them the assurance they would have a solid
base of popular support if they declared, as they did a few months later,
that the Duma was to surrender "all power to the Soviets".
Their support had little to do with a popular yearning for a socialist society, although that fueled the unrest. It had mostly to do with the misery and weariness occasioned by the First World War.
The Bolsheviks were the only party to propose a unilateral Russian withdrawal from the war, a radical land reform, and a redistribution of power and property in the country - encapsulated in the famous slogan "peace, land, and bread." The Mensheviks compromised on all of these issues, and watched their support among the soldiers, peasants, and urban workers steadily erode as the social crisis precipitated by the war deepened.
By the time of the Civil War, Bolshevik support was well consolidated and spreading to the farther reaches of the former Russian Empire.
The outside capitalist powers supported the Whites because a pre-revolutionary situation, characterized by military mutinies and work stoppages, had also developed in Western Europe - particularly in Germany - and they feared the explosive example of the Russian Revolution.
The Bolsheviks, in fact, took power on the assumption that their action would trigger socialist revolutions in Germany and other more developed capitalist West, and that these would come to the aid of the struggling republic of Soviets. They feared that if the revolution was confined to the USSR, it could not long sustain itself. It did, for three-quarters of a century, and succeeded in rapidly developing the country's industrial base and military power, but neither Lenin nor the other Bolsheviks came to power anticipating this was the course history would follow.