Bolsheviks

Bolsheviks (‘the majority’) The radical group of the Russian Social Democratic Party. It derived its name from the 1903 party congress, when it won the vote about the composition of the editorial board of the party newspaper, Iskra, against the future Mensheviks (‘the minority’). The term disguises the fact that Lenin's faction actually lost the most important vote at the congress, the issue of party membership, with the definition proposed by the future Mensheviks being accepted by a majority. Henceforth, the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks oscillated between cooperation and opposition, until in 1912 the Bolsheviks formally constituted themselves as a separate party under Lenin's leadership. By this time, they advocated violent revolution, in contrast to the Mensheviks' more gradualist approach to change. The Bolsheviks accepted Lenin's fundamental belief in the need for an elite leadership which would guide the proletariat to revolution and, ultimately, to Communism. With their leaders (Lenin, Zinoviev, and Stalin) in exile, they were surprised by the Russian (February) Revolution of 1917. Even after that, it took all of Lenin's political skills and his personal authority to forge a common response to the provisional government, and to organize the October Revolution. Once in power, the party leadership quickly established a hierarchical and authoritarian system of government, while seeking to establish the new Communist state through Cheka terror and the Russian Civil War. Once the Bolsheviks had established their control over all of Russia, they adopted the official title of Communist Party of Russia (and then Soviet Union), though the synonymous name of Bolsheviks continued to be in use until 1952.