My knowledge of the period is sketchy, but one thing I do remember is that the soviets were largely urban/factory-based. The former soviet union though was like 95% peasants; so while the soviets functioned very well to organize the urban proletariat, I'm not sure what they could have done about the peasants.
The peasants were a huge problem. Chekhov, one of the most compassionate men who ever lived, wrote a couple of stories that focus on peasant life: "Peasants" and "In the Ravine" that paint a very grim picture.
In other words, having won the revolution, the bolshies faced problems of a kind and on a scale that could not be solved by the soviets alone. I'm not saying everything they did was right, I'm just saying that they were dealing with a world-historic event; that they had to make stuff up as they went along, and that they were doing all this in very difficult conditions, not simply because the west was mobilized against them, but because the preconditions for building socialism were largely absent in that social/geographic domain.
Trotsky's "Revolution Betrayed," provides a fairly honest accounting of the matter.
Joanna