Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic

The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was the first Soviet state, the revolutionary Russia of October 1917 that became Soviet Russia and fought the civil war before entering the Soviet Union by treaty in December 1922. Proclaimed on 25 October 1917 as soviets seized the Winter Palace, it survived the German peace of Brest-Litovsk, the Czech rising, Kolchak from Siberia, Denikin from the south, Yudenich at Petrograd's gates and a dozen interventionist armies, because Trotsky built a Red Army faster than the Whites built a cause. From Moscow, Lenin's Sovnarkom decreed land, peace and workers' control while the Cheka dug the terror's foundations. War communism starved the cities to feed the fronts; the Kronstadt rising of 1921 forced the New Economic Policy retreat. In December 1922 Soviet Russia joined Belorussia, Ukraine and Transcaucasia in the Union treaty, and the independent republic passed into history as the giant of the new federation, three-quarters of its land and half its people.