Urban workers received weighted votes to counteract the peasantry's huge numerical superiority. Between congresses of Soviets, a 200-member Central Executive Committee was to exercise supreme power and appoint the executive, the Council of People's Commissars. A hierarchy of national, regional, provincial, district, and local soviets was to govern Soviet Russia. As the Soviet regime consolidated political control over central Russia, long repressed national aspirations for independence disintegrated the former tsarist empire until Russia was reduced virtually to the boundaries of 1600. The Civil war, like the time of Troubles, brought political conflict, social turmoil, foreign intervention, and ultimate national Russian resurgence and reunification.
Soviet accounts stress heroic Russian resistance in both instances to foreign aggression.
In Belorussia an anti-Communist Hromada declared independence, but the national movement there was less developed and lacked a broad popular following. In the Caucasus a Transcaucasian Federative Republic existed briefly in 1918 before yielding to separate regimes in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan under foreign protection. In Central Asia Tashkent was an isolated Bolshevik fortress in a sea of disunited Moslems. The SRs created regimes in western Siberia and at Samara on the Volga, while Cossack areas of the Urals and the North Caucasus formed a Southeastern Union. Russia had almost dissolved.