The Bolshevik movement was one branch of the revolutionary movement in pre-1917 Russia. It originated from the split at the Second Congress of the All-Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), held in 1903 in Brussels and London, when the movement broke into two, the Mensheviks (‘minority’) arguing for a less violent solution to Russia’s problems. The Bolsheviks (‘majority’), from whom developed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), were led by Lenin, who advocated a tightly-controlled revolutionary party.
Under his leadership the Bolsheviks developed the doctrine of the necessity for the masses to be led by the communist party (the vanguard of the proletariat), and for a more or less lengthy period of centralized state control over the people after a revolution before any democracy could be entertained (the dictatorship of the proletariat). When the first revolution of 1917 broke out in Russia, the Bolsheviks (now actually a minority among Social Democrats) were not immediately very powerful, and a moderate line, with which the Mensheviks could accord, was initially taken. However, the Bolsheviks were a far better disciplined and organized group, as well as being more ruthless, and in October 1917 they took power in a coup d’état, destroyed the liberals and the Mensheviks, and set about creating the party-controlled and centralized Russian state that lasted until the early 1990s. Thus was produced, especially after Stalin took control, Marxist-Leninism, the hard-line version of Marxism that the Mensheviks then, and many modern Marxist scholars now, see as a repudiation of much that Marx himself had argued for.
This is the complete article, containing 258 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
