Communist Party, Soviet

FEW POLITICAL institutions in history have had the impact of the Soviet Communist Party. For over seventy years, it governed Russia, then the Soviet Union, only one of two Superpowers in the modern world. More than that, the Soviet Communist Party, as the Bolshevik Party, also seized power in Russia in 1917, bringing to an end three centuries of rule by the Romanov Dynasty.

The Bolshevik Party began as part of the Social Democratic Labor Party, which had its first Congress, or meeting, in Minsk, Russia, in 1898. From the beginning, its avowed goal was the overthrow of the Romanovs. Robert Service wrote in his Lenin: a Biography, the party “envisaged that a revolution would be led against the Romanov monarchy by the working class and would result in the establishment of a democratic republic. Yet all but one of the Congress participants were arrested within a few weeks. A functioning party had yet to be created.”

With its program, the Social Democratic Labor Party firmly established itself as a Marxist party, placing itself on the foundations of Marxism as laid out by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. In it, Marx and Engels declared that “the Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”

The Social Democrats built upon a revolutionary tradition in Russia that began as early as the 1870s, with such groups as the Populists. D.M. Sturley, in A Short History of Russia, wrote of how “under the influence of Alexander Herzen and N.G. Chernyshevsky, students and professional people went out to preach revolutionary socialism to the peasants in the countryside. The peasants were quite unresponsive: they wanted land not ideas.” When revolution came to Russia, it would be through the working class, as Marx and Engels proclaimed. While the experiment of the Populists, or Narodniks, from the Russian word for “the people,” failed, they later provided much of the leadership for the more radical revolutionary movements like “Land and Freedom” (1876) and “The Peoples’ Will” (1879), as Sturley noted. It was on these last groups that the later Bolshevik Party based its program of action.