violence compounded with the returning soldiers led Pete Holquist to conclude: Soviet Russia was not simply a product of pure ideology, nor of the nature of the Russian village. Bolshevik ideology, sustained by resentments fostered in the late imperial period and exacerbated by the course of 1917, came to structure Soviet state violence. Violence, then, was not either timelessly Russian or the spontaneous product of ideology. 141 In this sense, the Russian Revolution was born out of violence, in contrast to the French Revolution which had been born of political debate on state finance and political representation. The events that followed ‘Red October’, the initial free-elects to Russia’s new Council of Soviets and Lenin’s ‘food and land’ speech that swayed the peasant support are also characteristic of Lenin’s understanding that revolution led to civil war. After it became clear that Bolsheviks would not hold the majority of power outside of industrial areas in the November elections, Lenin simply ousted his opponents. Bolshevik power seizure was seen as vital to re-implement the Constituent Assembly, the true organ of representative liberal democracy, but the election loss was branded as unfair by Lenin as the Bolsheviks received just 24percent of the vote. Lenin saw that a liberal, bourgeoisies’ assembly would have brought the class struggle to a head, and the assembly would have only been abolished by civil war; by November 1917, the Bolshevik minority had seized power violently, as political dialogue had failed. 142 141 Peter Holquist, “Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russian in the Epoch of Violence, 1905-1921” in Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History , 4.3, (June, 2003), pp.627-652, p. 652. 142 Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 , (2014), p. 135- 136.
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