Bolshevik

The Name and the Making of a Faction

The two factions were first called the "hards" (Lenin's supporters) and the "softs" (Martov's). The names Bolshevik and Menshevik came from the Russian for majority and minority, reflecting votes on important issues at the Second Congress (Brussels, then London, August 1903), but Martov's supporters won the party-membership vote, neither side held a firm majority throughout, and the Congress ended evenly split.

"Bolshevik" also had a specific administrative meaning: from spring 1917 until the 19th Congress, the added "(b)" in the names RKP(b) and VKP(b) denoted the Bolshevik faction. "Menshevik," first used by Lenin in articles of 1905, was never a formal party name; the Mensheviks called themselves simply the RSDLP, and from August 1917 to April 1918 "RSDLP (united)." Bolshevik thus functioned as the factional self-designation of one part of the party, not as a party-wide label.

1905-1914: Split and Armed Struggle

In the 1905-1907 revolution the two currents acted separately though within one party, and many organizations remained joint up to the October Revolution, especially in Siberia and Transcaucasia. The Bolsheviks held that the proletariat was the only class benefiting from the complete overthrow of the autocracy, stood for strict separation of the workers' movement from the bourgeois movement, prepared an armed uprising, and put forward the slogan "the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry"; the Mensheviks expected the Constituent Assembly might be convened peacefully and viewed armed uprising as justified only amid a European revolution.

The question of political responsibility is documented as well. After initially criticizing terrorism as practiced by the SRs, the Bolsheviks created their own armed bodies, the "Military-Technical Group" and related groups, and in autumn 1905 Lenin openly called for killing police and gendarmes, Black Hundreds and Cossacks and for blowing up police stations. In Petersburg, on the instructions of the party committee, the "Tver" teahouse, where workers had gathered, was attacked: 2 workers were killed and 15 wounded. Lenin publicly declared robbery an acceptable means of revolutionary struggle, and according to Anna Geifman's account the Bolsheviks were the only Social-Democratic faction in Russia that resorted to expropriations ("exes") in an organized and systematic way, their centre being the "Bolshevik Centre" secretly organized inside the RSDLP Central Committee by Lenin with Krasin and Bogdanov in October 1905. In the Tiflis expropriation of 12 June 1907 bombs were thrown at mail carriages and 250,000 rubles seized while dozens of passers-by were killed and wounded; in the 26 August 1909 raid on a mail train at Miass station 7 guards and policemen were killed and about 60,000 rubles and 24 kg of gold taken.

Party condemnation is documented too: Martov proposed expelling the Bolsheviks for illegal expropriations, Plekhanov urged fighting "Bolshevik Bakuninism," and Fedor Dan called the Bolshevik members of the RSDLP Central Committee a company of criminals. The attempt to exchange the Tiflis money in Europe turned the whole RSDLP, in European eyes, into a criminal organization. On the death of the manufacturer and revolutionary Nikolai Shmidt in Butyrka prison on 13 February 1907, three accounts circulate: authorities said suicide by a mentally ill prisoner, Bolsheviks said criminals in prison killed him on the authorities' orders, and a third version holds that Bolsheviks organized the killing to obtain his inheritance, most of which he had willed to the Bolsheviks in March 1906.

The de facto split came in 1912, when the Prague Conference permanently broke relations with the Mensheviks and recallists and declared an independent party, RSDLP(b). The name RSDLP(b) was never formally adopted at a congress or conference, the party being formally constituted as a separate RSDLP(b) in spring 1917. Bolshevik Duma deputies left the joint social-democratic faction in 1913. The Mensheviks organized a rival conference in Vienna in August 1912 that condemned the Prague conference and created the loose "August Bloc." A counter-account should be recorded: opponents of the Bolsheviks later asserted that the Bolshevik-heavy composition of the Prague Conference resulted from deliberate selection of delegates by Bolshevik agents together with the tsarist Police Department's security branch. The split was not a one-step event: between 1903 and 1904 many members changed sides, Plekhanov had parted from Lenin by 1904, and Trotsky, after first supporting the Mensheviks, left them in September 1904 and remained a self-described "non-factional social democrat" until August 1917, when he joined the Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik faction itself was not monolithic: Lenin's break with Alexander Bogdanov (1908-1910) over Duma participation and philosophy produced the recallists and ultimatists, who later grouped around Vpered.

World War, 1917 and the Party Name

With the start of World War I repression of the Bolsheviks conducting a defeatist policy intensified: Pravda was closed in July 1914, Bolshevik Duma deputies were exiled to Siberia in November 1914, and illegal organizations were shut down. The February Revolution of 1917 caught the Bolsheviks by surprise as it did other Russian revolutionary parties; local organizations were very weak or unformed and most leaders were in emigration, prison or exile. The party numbered about 25,000 in February 1917 (a revised estimate of roughly 10,000), growing to about 300,000 by October. After February the Bolshevik press initially tacked right: from 14 (27) March 1917 Pravda, under the leadership of Stalin, Kamenev and Muranov returning from Turukhansk exile, adopted "revolutionary defencism." After Lenin's return in April 1917 the Petrograd Committee rejected the April Theses by 13 votes to 2, while the April All-Russian Conference (22-29 April) adopted them and set a course for socialist revolution in Russia and a break with other socialist parties. After the October Revolution of 1917 power lay with the Bolshevik government, the Council of People's Commissars headed by Lenin; during the Civil War all Bolshevik opponents on the territory of the former Russian Empire were defeated (except Finland, Poland and the Baltic states, which gained independence) and the party became the sole legal party in the country.

The party adopted successive names: RSDLP(b) from 1912, the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from 1918 to 1925, the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from 1925 to 1952, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1952 to 1991. After Lenin's death the once-fluid principles of revolutionary Bolshevism hardened into fixed ideas (the Encyclopedia of Marxism calls this "neo-Bolshevism"); in the struggle between the left wing (Trotsky) and the centre (Stalin) both accused each other of betraying the "principles of Lenin." Stalin won the debate in 1927 and purged the Left Opposition from party and state posts, with Trotsky's Soviet citizenship revoked, followed by the purge of the right wing led by Bukharin. More than two-thirds of the Bolsheviks who had participated in the October Revolution were no longer in the party. The word "Bolsheviks" remained in the party name until 1952, when the 19th Congress renamed it the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Trotsky and his supporters used the self-designation "Bolshevik-Leninists."

Distinctions

The Bolsheviks should be distinguished from the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) that succeeded the 1903 faction organizationally but was not identical to it, and from "the Reds" or the Soviet state as a whole: "Bolshevik" is one faction within the broader 1917 party landscape.

In English-language usage starting in 1907 the term "Maximalist" was sometimes used for "Bolshevik" and "Minimalist" for "Menshevik." This proved confusing because a separate Maximalist faction existed in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party (1904-1906, and after 1906 a separate Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries Maximalists); a contemporary source called the equation of "Maximalist" with "Bolshevik" historically false, so the two must not be treated as equivalent.

The term was taken up in party names elsewhere, such as the Bolshevik Party of India, the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma, and the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party of Ceylon (from 1950 reunified into the LSSP), showing the label's reuse by non-Russian and often Fourth Internationalist groupings rather than a single organizational lineage.

Finally, hostile usages should be recorded: "Bolo" by British personnel in the North Russian Expeditionary Force during the Civil War, and in Cold War Britain "Bolshies" for trade unionists and leftists, first as a slur and later as slang for anyone rebellious. Nazi propaganda linked Bolshevism to Jews, coining the derogatory term "zhido-bolsheviki" ("Jewish Bolsheviks"), which is recorded as an example of hostile usage rather than as fact.