International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

Bolsheviks were Marxist revolutionaries active in early twentieth-century Russia who devoted their lives to creating a tightly knit political organization with the intention of leading a mass insurrection of discontented workers and peasants against the oppressive social, economic, and political conditions of the autocratic tsarist regime. Their efforts earned them an important place in modern history because, distrustful of the coalition socialist-liberal provisional government that had replaced the tsarist regime in the wake of the first Russian Revolution of February 1917, led by Lenin (1870–1924) and Trotsky (1879–1940) they harnessed a wave of popular radicalism among the peasantry and proletariat and organized a second revolution in October 1917. The first revolution in world history carried out by a self-consciously Marxist party, it eventually transformed the huge Russian empire into the Soviet Union, the first militantly communist and anti-capitalist nation in the world and one of only two superpowers to emerge from World War II. Today “Bolsheviks” generally refers to those men and women who were members of the Leninist party in the pre-revolutionary era of exile and underground struggle and the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 through 1921. Initially, Russian Marxists were united in one party, the revolutionary Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). The RSDLP ... log in or subscribe to read full text