the proletariat--guided by intellectual cadres trained for the purpose and intolerant of further revolutionary dissent. One of the first actions was to suppress press freedom:
We Bolsheviki have always said that when we reached a position of power we would close the bourgeois press. To tolerate the bourgeois newspapers would mean to cease being a Socialist. When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward--or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the Press' goes backward, and halts our headlong course toward Socialism. . . . Now that the insurrection is over, we have absolutely no desire to suppress the papers of the other Socialist parties, except inasmuch as they appeal to armed insurrection, or to dis obedience to the Soviet Government (Reed, 1960, pp. 356-7).
Lenin's cadres set about the project of institutionalizing communist control over all segments of Russian society, overseen by intellectual cadres that guided the course of the dictatorship of the proletariat as it took control of the means of production. The mechanism was the Supreme Council of the National Economy, which nationalized all factories and prohibited all private commerce, including agricultural production (Husband, 1997, p. 284). According to Orlovsky, complete state takeover of all economic life did not occur until after 1918, in the wake of the hostile Allied response to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the letdown felt by Russian radicals who had thought that the separate peace would end the Great War altogether and usher in world socialism. In any case, the whole project of Bolshevik/Soviet usurpation of complete economic control came to be called War Communism, a term that Orlovsky (1997, p. 258) says Lenin devised after the fact in order to emphasize its provisional nature.
War Communism formally placed industrial and agricultural production as well as trade and prices under state control. As a practical matter...