Bolshevik
Bolsheviks (
IPA , derived from
bolshinstvo, "majority") were members of the Bolshevik faction of the
marxist Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Bolsheviks had an extreme socialist and internationalist outlook, and were opponents of the
Russian traditional statehood and the
Russian Orthodox Church. The other faction of the RSDLP was known as the
Mensheviks, derived from the word
men'shinstvo ("minority"). The split into two factions occurred at the Second
Party Congress in 1903. After the split, the Bolshevik party was designated as RSDLP(b) (Russian: РСÐ"РП(б)), where "b" stands for "Bolsheviks".
Bolsheviks led by
Vladimir Lenin seized power in Russia in 1917 in an event known as the
October Revolution. Shortly after seizing power, the party changed its name to the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (РКП(б)) in 1918 and was generally known as the Communist Party after that point. However, it was not until 1952 that the party formally dropped the word "Bolshevik" from its name. (See
Congress of the CPSU article for the timeline of name changes.)
The word "Bolshevik" is sometimes used as a synonym for
Communist. In the
United States, it was often used by right-wingers as a derogatory term for left-wingers, few of whom were actually Communists.
The Bolshevik political platform has often been referred to as
Bolshevism.
Leon Trotsky frequently used the terms "Bolshevism" and "Bolshevist" after his exile from the Soviet Union to differentiate between what he saw as true
Leninism and the regime within the state and the party which arose under
Stalin. However, "Bolshevism" today is commonly associated with the Stalinist regime which existed in the
Soviet Union.
 |
Bolshevik Party Meeting. |
The 1903 Split
At the Second Congress of the RSDLP, held in
Brussels and
London in August 1903, Lenin advocated limiting party membership to a small core of professional revolutionaries, leaving sympathizers outside the party, and instituting a system of centralized control known as the
democratic centralist model.
Julius Martov, until then a close friend and colleague of Lenin's, agreed with him that the core of the party should consist of professional revolutionaries, but argued that party membership should be open to sympathizers, revolutionary workers and other
fellow travellers. The two had disagreed on the issue as early as April-May 1903, but it wasn't until the Congress that their differences became irreconcilable and split the party
[See Israel Getzler. Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat, Cambridge University Press, 2003 (first edition 1967), ISBN 0521526027 p.78]. Although at first the disagreement appeared to be minor and inspired by personal conflicts, e.g. Lenin's insistence on dropping less active editorial board members from
Iskra or Martov's support for the Organizing Committee of the Congress which Lenin opposed, the differences quickly grew and the split became irreparable.
Origins of the Name
The two factions were originally known as "hard" (Lenin's supporters) and "soft" (Martov's supporters). Soon, however, the terminology changed to "Bolsheviks" and "Mensheviks", from the Russian "bolshinstvo" (majority) and "menshinstvo" (minority), based on the fact that Lenin's supporters narrowly defeated Martov's supporters on the question of party membership. Neither Lenin nor Martov had a firm majority throughout the Congress as delegates left or switched sides. At the end, the Congress was evenly split between the two factions.
From 1907 on, English language articles sometimes used the term "Maximalist" for "Bolshevik" and "Minimalist" for "Menshevik", which proved confusing since there was also a "Maximalist" faction within the Russian
Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1904-1906 and then again after 1917.
Beginning of the 1905 Revolution (1903-1905)
The two factions were in a state of flux in 1903-1904 with many members changing sides. The founder of Russian Marxism,
Georgy Plekhanov, who was at first allied with
Lenin and the Bolsheviks, parted ways with them by 1904.
Leon Trotsky at first supported the Mensheviks, but left them in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He remained a self-described "non-factional social democrat" until August 1917 when he joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks as their positions converged and he came to believe that Lenin was right on the issue of the party.
The lines between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks hardened in April 1905 when the Bolsheviks held a Bolsheviks-only meeting in London, which they call the Third Party Congress. The Mensheviks organized a rival conference and the split was thus formalized.
The Bolsheviks played a relatively minor role in the 1905 revolution, and were a minority in the
St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies led by Trotsky. The less significant Moscow
Soviet, however, was dominated by the Bolsheviks. These soviets became the model for the Soviets that were formed in 1917.
Attempts to Re-unite with the Mensheviks (1906-1907)
As the
Russian Revolution of 1905 progressed, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and smaller non-Russian social democratic parties operating with the Russian Empire attempted to reunify at the Fourth (Unification) Congress of the RSDLP held at
Folkets hus,
Norra Bantorget in
Stockholm, April 1906. With the Mensheviks striking an alliance with the
Jewish Bund, the Bolsheviks found themselves in a minority. However, all factions retained their respective factional structure and the Bolsheviks formed the
Bolshevik Center, the de-facto governing body of the Bolshevik faction with the RSDLP. At the next, Fifth Congress held in London in May 1907, the Bolsheviks were in the majority, but the two factions continued functioning mostly independently of each other.
Split between Lenin and Bogdanov (1908-1909)
With the defeat of the revolution in mid-1907 and the adoption of a new, highly restrictive election law, the Bolsheviks began debating whether to boycott the new parliament known as the Third
Duma. Lenin and his supporters
Grigory Zinoviev and
Lev Kamenev argued for participating in the Duma while Lenin's deputy philosopher
Alexander Bogdanov,
Anatoly Lunacharsky,
Mikhail Pokrovsky and other argued that the social democratic faction in the Duma should be recalled. The latter became known as "recallists" ("otzovists" in Russian). A smaller group within the Bolshevik faction demanded that the RSDLP central committee should give its sometimes unruly Duma faction an ultimatum, demanding complete subordination to all party decisions. This group became known as "ultimatists" and was generally allied with the recallists.
With a majority of Bolshevik leaders either supporting Bogdanov or undecided by mid-
1908 when the differences became irreconcilable, Lenin concentrated on undermining Bogdanov's reputation as a philosopher. In
1909 he published a scathing book of criticism entitled
Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909)
[First published in Moscow in May 1909 by Zveno Publishers, available online], assaulting Bogdanov's position and accusing him of philosophical idealism
[See Alan Woods. Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution, Wellred Publications, 1999, ISBN 1900007053 Part Three: The Period of Reaction available online]. In June 1909, Bogdanov was defeated at a Bolshevik mini-conference in
Paris organized by the editorial board of the Bolshevik magazine "Proletary" and expelled from the Bolshevik faction
[English language excerpts from the resolution are quoted in A Documentary History of Communism in Russia, ed. Robert V. Daniels, UPNE, 1993, ISBN 0874516161 p.33].
Final Attempt at Party Unity (1910)
With both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks weakened by splits within their ranks and by
Tsarist repression, they were tempted to try to re-unite the party. In January 1910, Leninists, recallists and various Menshevik factions held a meeting of the party's Central Committee in Paris. Kamenev and Zinoviev were dubious about the idea, but were willing to give it a try under pressure from "conciliator" Bolsheviks like
Victor Nogin. Lenin was adamantly opposed to any re-unification, but was outvoted within the Bolshevik leadership. The meeting reached a tentative agreement and one of its provisions made Trotsky's
Vienna-based
Pravda a party-financed 'central organ'. Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, was added to the editorial board from the Bolsheviks, but the unification attempts failed in August 1910 when Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual recriminations.
Forming a Separate Party (1912)
The factions permanently broke off relations in January 1912 after the Bolsheviks organized a Bolsheviks-only
Prague Party Conference and formally expelled Mensheviks and recallists from the party. As a result, they ceased to be a faction in the RSDLP and instead declared themselves an independent party, which they called RSDLP (Bolshevik).
Although the Bolshevik leadership decided to form a separate party, convincing pro-Bolshevik workers within Russia to follow suit proved difficult. When the first meeting of the Fourth Duma was convened in late 1912, only one out of six Bolshevik deputies,
Matvei Muranov, (the other one,
Roman Malinovsky, was later exposed as a
secret police agent) voted to break away from the
Menshevik faction within the Duma on
15 December 1912.
[Robert B. McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions: workers and revolutionaries, June 1907-February 1917, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 140-1.] The Bolshevik leadership eventually prevailed and the Bolsheviks formed their own Duma faction in September 1913.
 |
Bolsheviks with Lenin in the middle. |
Political Philosophy
The Bolsheviks believed in organizing the party in a strongly centralized hierarchy that sought to overthrow the
Tsar and achieve power. Although the Bolsheviks were not completely monolithic, they were characterized by a rigid adherence to the leadership of the
central committee, based on the notion of
democratic centralism. The Mensheviks favored open party membership and espoused cooperation with the other socialist and some non-socialist groups in Russia. Bolsheviks generally refused to co-operate with
liberal or radical parties (which they labeled "
bourgeois") or even eventually other
socialist organizations, although Lenin sometimes made tactical alliances.
 |
Left to right: Trotsky, Lenin, and Kamenev |
During the
First World War, the Bolsheviks took an
internationalist stance that emphasized
solidarity between the workers of Russia,
Germany, and the rest of the world, and broke with the
Second International when its leading parties ended up supporting their own nations in the conflict.
July Days
In early July widespread discontent in Petrograd led to militant demonstrations calling for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The Bolshevik leadership opposed this as premature but ended up leading the demonstrations, hoping to prevent any bloodshed. They felt compelled to do this to win the trust of the workers and also in recognition of the fact that many of the Bolshevik rank and file were already organising and supporting the demonstrations. Troops loyal to the Provisional Government suppressed the demonstrations violently. The following crackdown resulted in the Kerensky government ordering the arrest of the Bolshevik leadership on
July 19. Lenin escaped capture, went into hiding, and wrote
State and Revolution, which outlined his ideas for a socialist government.
The repression against the Bolsheviks ceased when the Kerensky government was threatened by a
rebellion led by
General Kornilov and offered arms to those who would defend Petrograd against Kornilov. The Bolsheviks enlisted a 25,000 strong
militia to defend Petrograd from attack and reached out to Kornilov's troops, urging them not to attack. They stood down and the rebellion fizzled with Kornilov being taken into custody. However, the Bolsheviks did not return their arms and Kerensky succeeded only in strengthening the Bolshevik position.
During this period a situation of
dual power developed. While the legislature and provisional government were controlled by Kerensky in coalition with the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the workers' and soldiers' soviets were increasingly under the control of the Bolsheviks.
October Revolution
|
Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev |
The
Central Committee of the Bolsheviks spent September and October of 1917 debating whether they should use parliamentary methods or whether they should seize power by force. With Lenin in hiding in Finland, the parliamentary line at first prevailed and the Bolsheviks participates in the quasiparliamentary bodies convened by the Provisional Government, the
Democratic Conference and the smaller, more permanent
Pre-Parliament. Lenin sent numerous letters to the Central Committee and Petrograd party activists urging them to abandon the parliamentary path and overthrow the Provisional Government by means of an
insurrection. The balance of power within the Central Committee shifted in favor of the insurrection in early October resulting in the Bolshevik delegation withdrawing from the Pre-Parliament on October 7, 1917 (Old Style).
[See the excerpts from the Central Committee meeting minutes in V. I. Lenin. Toward the Seizure of Power: Part One, International Publishers, 1932 (Kessinger Publishing reprint) ISBN 1419162918 p.302]On
October 10, the Bolshevik Central Committee held a meeting and decided in favor of an uprising with only Zinoviev and Kamenev voting against it. The latter took the unusual step of making their objections public, which infuriated Lenin, who demanded their
expulsion from the party for breaching
party discipline. The Central Committee also established a smaller
Politburo to prepare for the uprising, although it's not clear whether it was ever functional (Trotsky later claimed that it never met) and was dissolved on
October 25,
1917, once the Bolsheviks had taken power in the
October Revolution. A permanent Politburo was not established until March 1919 during the
Russian Civil War when decisions had to be made quickly and many Central Committee members were away from the new capital, Moscow.
When Kerensky moved against the Bolsheviks on
October 22 by ordering the arrest of their
Military Revolutionary Committee, banning the Bolshevik newspaper and cutting off telephone lines to the Bolshevik headquarters in the
Smolny Institute, Trotsky urged that the Bolsheviks' decision on overthrowing the government be put into action. Lenin concurred and on
October 24, orders were issued for the Bolsheviks'
Red Guards to occupy key locations in the city and surround the
Winter Palace where the Provisional government had its headquarters. The uprising was a success and Bolshevik-led forces were in control of the capital by October 26.
On October 25-26, 1917, the Second
All-Russian Congress of Soviets met and established a new government called the
Council of People's Commissars or
Sovnarkom. Lenin became the head (Chairman) of the new government, Trotsky became the first
People's Commissar for foreign affairs and other Bolshevik leaders took over other government ministries which were known as "commissariats" until 1946.
|
Kustodijew: The Bolshevik, 1920 |
In March 1918, the
Seventh Party Congress of the Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) met and changed the name of the party to the
All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to differentiate it from the Mensheviks and other remaining factions of the RSDLP.
After the name change, the party was increasingly known as the "Communist Party" with the name "Bolshevik" gradually becoming a reference to the party's earlier days. The word "Bolshevik" was retained when the party changed its name to the
All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 to emphasize the fact that the party included not only Russian but also non-Russian segments within the recently formed
Soviet Union. It was finally dropped from the party's formal name in October 1952 when the Nineteenth Party Congress changed the party's name to the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Parallel with the gradual removal of the word "Bolshevik" from the party's name,
Joseph Stalin conducted the
Great Purge in which most leaders of the original Bolshevik Party (including all surviving members of the original Politburo) were expelled, imprisoned or killed. For
Leon Trotsky, the only one of the old Bolshevik leaders who survived long enough in foreign exile to found a lasting political and ideological tradition of his own, "Bolshevik" and "Stalinist" came to be totally antithetical terms, tantamount to light and darkness, Good and Evil.
Trotskyists up to the present still tend to regard "Bolshevik" as a positive term and indeed the highest form of praise. Some of them use the word "Bolshevik" in the names of their parties or factions as well as their newspapers.
For his part, Stalin never accepted this
dichotomy, and even though he gradually abandoned the name, he and subsequent Soviet leaders always claimed that they continued the work of the Bolsheviks. The term "Bolshevik" was also used interchangeably with the term "Communist" by many anti-Communists who were critical of the Soviet Union throughout its existence.
Anti-communists, and particularly fascists, often used the term "Jewish Bolshevism", alluding to the fact that some of the Bolshevik leaders were of Jewish ethnicity or ancestry.
Winston Churchill, in an article which originally appeared in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8, 1920, wrote:
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews …[Churchhill, Winston. Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People. Illustrated Sunday Herald. 8 February 1920.]
Even the American Ambassador to Russia, David Francis, wrote in January 1918 that most of the Bolshevik leaders were Jewish.
[Francis, David R. Russia From the American Embassy. New York: C. Scribner's & Sons, 1921. p. 214.] Also, in a report to the United States and other governments from British Intelligence, entitled "A Monthly Review of the Progress of Revolutionary Movements Abroad", it is stated in the first paragraph that international Communism is controlled by Jews.
[U.S. National Archives. Dept. of State Decimal File, 1910-1929, file 861.00/5067.]Others argue that the Jewish role was not overwhelming, citing statistics such as:
In 1922, of the 44,148 members of the Bolshevik party that had joined before 1917 (the Old Guard, as Lenin referred to them) only 7.1% were Jewish (65% were Russian).
Among Lenin's 15 peoples' comissars, only 1 was Jewish (
Trotsky). Among the 23
narkoms between 1923-1930, there were 12 Russians, 5 Jews, 2 Georgians (
Stalin and
Ordzhonikidze), 1 Pole, 1 Moldavian, 1 Latvian, and 1 Ukrainian.
There were 3 Jews in the Politburo in the first half of the 1920's (Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev). There were none among the 9 members of the Politburo in 1927, the above three having been expelled from the Party. In the 1930's, there was only 1 person of Jewish descent in the Politburo, namely
Kaganovich, known for his devotion to Joseph Stalin.
There are also claims that Jews, while not dominating the politics of the Soviet regime, were highly prominent among the members of the secret police and other instruments of oppression. Indeed, of the 12 members of the
Cheka Counter-revolutionary department in 1918, 6 were Jewish. However, of the 42 Cheka prosecutors in September, 1918, at the height of
Red Terror, only 8 were Jewish (14 Latvians, 13 Russians, 7 Poles). Only 3.7% of the rank-and-file
Cheka agents were Jewish at that time.
In the mid-1930's, under the leadership of
Genrikh Yagoda (who was Jewish), the Jewish presence in the secret police briefly became dominant: of the people surrounding Yagoda, 39% were Jewish and only 30% Russian. Yagoda's secret police oversaw the execution of both Zinoviev and Kamenev, but fell victim to Stalin's next round of purges: Yagoda was replaced with ethnic Russian
Nikolai Yezhov in September 1936, arrested and executed in March 1937. Under Yezhov, the number of Jews fell precipitiously (to just 6 people) while the number of ethnic Russians among the leadership of the secret police,
NKVD rose to 102 people (67%) and the purges, at Stalin's instigation, entered their bloodiest period (1937-1938).
See [
1] and [
2](in Russian) for sources, more numbers and commentary.
See also: Zydokomuna* During the days of the
Cold War in the
United Kingdom, labour union leaders and other leftists were sometimes derisively described as "Bolshie." The usage is roughly equivalent to the term "
Red" or "
Pinko" in the
United States during the same period. However these days it is often used to describe a difficult or rebellious person e.g:"Timothy, don't be so bolshie!" An alternate spelling is "bolshy". (Collins Mini Dictionary 1998)
* In
Israel during the 1950's and the 1960's, opponents of then Prime Minister
David Ben Gurion sometimes accused him of being "a Bolshevik". Although Ben Gurion was a staunch anti-Communist, the idea was that his party
Mapai had a stranglehold on political and social life and no opposition party had a real chance to win an election until the
1970s.
* In present-day Israel, the term is used to accuse any politician, of whatever political colouring, of authoriatarian or tyrannical behaviour. During the
2005 evacuation of the
Gaza Strip, PM
Ariel Sharon was frequently called "a bolshevik" by his opponents.
*
Group of Democratic Centralism *
Marxism*
List of socialists - Bolsheviks*
Soviet Union*
History of the Soviet Union*
Russian Revolution of 1917, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution.
*
Communist Party of the Soviet Union*
History of the Jews in Russia and Soviet Union*
Yevsektsiya*
Enemy of the people*
Old Bolshevik*
National Bolshevik*
Neo-Bolshevism*
Twenty Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-and-File Bolshevik, by
Cecilia Bobrovskaya*
Bolshevism, the Road to Revolution, by
Alan Woods*
The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, by
Maurice Brinton*
Pathfinder Books, Communist bookstore online*
The Tarasov Saga*
Russian Emigre Interview*
'Seeds of the Revolution' Documentary* by
Bertrand Russell, November 1920
