ABSTRACT
The Soviet framework had taken shape under the shadow of the Provisional Government, and it was duly extended wherever Bolshevik rule was established. For liberal historians, 'degeneration' was implicit in pre-revolutionary Bolshevik ideology. In the Ukraine, where the Bolsheviks continued to use Poor Peasant Committees, hatred of both sides in the Civil War generated a remarkable independent peasant army. The Bolsheviks came to terms with a mixed economy and 'War Communism' gave way to the new economic policy (NEP). An anti-Bolshevik provisional revolutionary committee demanded political freedom for all socialist parties, free elections to the soviets, and the replacement of requisitioning by free trade in grain. Severely weakened by the devastating impact of economic dislocation and civil war, rank-and-file workers lost control over the Soviet State. The bulk of the Red Army was demobilized but the brutalizing experience of civil war had severely weakened democratic currents within the Party.
