Bolsheviks

Bolsheviks (Russian for “members of the majority”) developed as a significant faction within the revolutionary socialist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) as a result of ideological and organizational splits in the party's ranks at its 1903 Congress. The other important faction that emerged was called Mensheviks (“members of the minority”), and while nominally part of the same socialist party, the two factions often worked independently of each other until the Bolsheviks formed a separate party in 1912. The Bolsheviks are historically significant because, led by N. Lenin (1870–1924), they overthrew the Russian government in October 1917 and set the former Russian Empire on its way to becoming the Soviet Union, the first avowedly communist and anti-imperialist nation in the world that also became a major superpower in the 20th century.

The RSDLP, a political party formed illegally by Russian socialists at a congress at Minsk in 1898 to unite various Russian revolutionary associations into one political force, was based on the Marxist doctrines of class struggle, the historical necessity of proletarian revolution to end all human exploitation, and the desirability of a future non-alienated, communist society of socially equal citizens. Activism and social justice were at the top of their agenda. The delegates were arrested by the Tsarist regime, which outlawed [Page 255]all independent political activity in the autocratic Russian Empire. The year before the Second RSDLP Congress in 1903, a young revolutionary by the name of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his revolutionary alias N. Lenin, published What Is to Be Done? In the conditions of Tsarist autocracy, which tolerated no political parties and no parliamentary government, the pamphlet outlined Lenin's strategic vision for the RSDLP's activism and fight for social justice: Composed of disciplined activists and agitators organized along democratic centralist lines, the party was to be the vanguard of proletarian revolution. Party members would be full-time revolutionaries while sympathizers would remain outside the party organized into auxiliary institutions like trade unions and other “mass” organizations. Lenin called his model a party of a new type, one that was not interested in electoral success but in inculcating revolutionary consciousness and activism in the mass of workers and peasants and in organizing the revolutionary overthrow of the government in order to clear the way for a just society based on socialist principles. He proposed a theory of democratic centralism to govern all internal party processes and debates. The democratic aspect referred to the freedom of party members to discuss and debate matters of policy and direction freely and openly within the party and to vote for leaders democratically; however, once the members came to a decision by majority vote, all members, even the dissenters and/or losers, were expected to support and follow that decision in public. This latter aspect denoted the doctrine's centralism. As Lenin characterized it, democratic centralism consisted of freedom of discussion and criticism tied to unity of action and purpose.

Following a robust tendency within Marxism, Bolsheviks held that socialism could only be achieved by revolutionary means, which meant overthrowing the existing state and then using the state's coercive power to consolidate socialism and defeat its enemies, the old ruling classes. Lenin held that the revolution would be followed by a dictatorship (i.e., emergency rule) of the proletariat, which he characterized as a class-based democracy in which workers and peasants would hold political power through elected councils known as soviets. Lenin and his followers steadfastly contended that any attempt to achieve socialism by reforming capitalism was doomed to failure because the ruling classes would turn the class-based power (i.e., “dictatorship”) of the present state against workers and peasants seeking reform as it had done in the past.

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