In November 1920, as Baron Petr Vrangel organized the final retreat of White Russia from the Crimean peninsula across the Black Sea, the fledgling Bolshevik regime turned to confront the new challenge of postrevolutionary state building. In three years of civil war, the Bolsheviks mastered the ability to employ coercion against military foes in the field and political opponents at home. Now the Bolsheviks sought to extend their influence beyond the urban industrial areas to Russia's vast rural and multiethnic periphery. But the infrastructural powers of the new state were especially weak at this time. Even Lenin had at first openly speculated that the Bolsheviks would last at best one year. In less than a decade, however, they constructed the foundation and framework of communism's command–administrative state and extended their reach across Soviet Russia's fractious and far-flung regions.