The Bolsheviks seized power in the name of the soviets, councils of deputies chosen in factories and other places of employment by workers supportive of the revolution. After the Bolshevik takeover in late 1917, the soviets provided some of the trappings of democracy but little or none of its substance. Elections to them proved to be easy for Bolshevik agents to manipulate, and within several years they had become little more than localized organs for the despotism of the Communist Party. The constitutional slogan was periodically updated—from “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the first two decades to “state of the whole people” in the Brezhnev period—but the underlying reality of one-party rule persisted.

The initial justification for the abrogation of civil rights was that a brief interlude of dictatorship was a necessary precondition of the socialist paradise ahead. As that paradise receded into the indefinite future, the Soviet leaders felt free in essence to rule as they pleased.