How were Lenins ideas of Socialism and Communism appealing to Russians at this time?
The appeal of Lenin’s ideas can be summed up in the two Bolshevik slogans of 1917: “All Power to the Soviets” and “Bread, Land and Peace”. The soviets were councils that had begun to spontaneously form during and after the 1905 Revolution. After the February Revolution they sprang up across the country and were genuinely democratic institutions, running everything from factories to city blocks and towns. Lenin, although initially hostile to them, realised that they could be controlled by having Bolsheviks in key posts on them. The Bolsheviks began to take control of the major ones from about April 1917. Bread, land and peace was a popular rallying cry because it summed up what many Russians wanted. The army was sucking in young men from the villages – seeds were not sown, harvest were not brought in – the towns were starving. The peasants wanted to own the land they worked on, and to not pay rent on land they had worked for generations. Peace because the army was fairing very badly in
