A Capital Shake-up

Elections to the constituent assembly were held as scheduled, but when the results did not suit the Bolsheviks (they received only 25% of the vote whereas their rivals, the rural-based Socialist Revolutionaries, received over 55%), the Red Army dissolved the assembly and arrested its members. What followed was three years of violent bloodshed as Russia withdrew from World War I and fell into civil war. Despite fierce resistance across the countryside, the Bolsheviks prevailed and by the end of 1920 most of the country had been pacified. Victims of the Civil War and the subsequent Red Terror proclaimed by Lenin to suppress counter- revolution and consolidate power numbered in the millions.*

Fearing foreign intervention and wanting to make a break from the tsarist past, the Bolsheviks moved the capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1918. A depleted Petersburg took a back seat as Moscow re- emerged as Russia's political and economic center. The privations of the World War, Revolution, and Civil War drove many of Petersburg's inhabitants out into the countryside, and by 1920 less than one third of Petersburg's 1916 population remained in the city.

Stalin, who emerged victorious from the power struggle following Lenin's death in 1924, despised Petersburg and its ties with both tsarism and the old revolutionaries who overthrew it. Throughout his career as party leader he viewed Leningrad (as they renamed Petrograd after Lenin's death) as a threat and a potential rival to his power. In 1934 the charismatic and popular Leningrad Party Leader, Sergei Kirov, rumored to be a potential replacement for Stalin, was assassinated in his office by a secret agent under Stalin's orders. This marked the beginning of the Great Purges which lasted until 1938, during which millions of people were killed or sent to labor camps (gulags) on little or no foundation. Almost all of the Old Bolsheviks were arrested, tortured, publicly tried, and summarily shot after confessing to absurd fabricated crimes. The labor camps' population in 1938 reached eight million, and most inmates did not survive. As a result of this reign of terror a generation of bureaucrats rose that was absolutely loyal to Stalin.