also bol·she·vism n.

1. The strategy developed by the Bolsheviks between 1903 and 1917 with a view to seizing state power and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.
2. Soviet Communism.

[BOLSHEV(IK) + –ISM.]

Political theory and practice of the Bolshevik Party which, under Lenin, came to power during the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The Bolshevik (meaning ‘majority’) radical communist faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour party emerged during the 1903 Party Congress following the split with the more moderate Mensheviks (meaning ‘minority’). After a period of intermittent collaboration and schism with the latter, the Bolshevik Party was formally constituted in 1912.

The 1905 Revolution took the Bolsheviks by surprise and there was little formal activity. The ensuing repression forced the party into clandestinity, and contact with the exiles, led by Lenin, was difficult. After the outbreak of the First World War, whilst Lenin proclaimed ‘revolutionary defeatism’, the Bolshevik organization inside Russia was practically moribund. The February Revolution of 1917 found the Bolsheviks unprepared. The majority of the Central Committee and the editorial board of Pravda (headed by Stalin) gave conditional support to the Provisional Government and entered unity discussions with the Mensheviks. Party membership soared, exiles returned, but there were problems of loss of direction. On his return to Russia, Lenin's April Theses (no support for the Provisional Government; the Revolution was passing from the democratic to the socialist stage; under a Bolshevik majority the Soviets must assume state power) were poorly received. He found the Party divided between a group which advocated an immediate uprising and a Central Committee which desired a peaceful accretion of power. Lenin appealed to the rank-and-file, arguing that ‘the masses are a hundred times to the left of us’. However, he resisted calls for insurrection in both June and July, declaring that ‘one wrong move on our part can wreck everything’. The Party remained divided right up to the October insurrection; Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed it, and Lenin was forced to threaten resignation unless the uprising took place.

The immediate post-revolutionary situation—the period of war communism—saw the beginning of the transformation of the Communist Party into a bureaucratically organized, top-down apparatus, the eclipse of the soviets and the trade unions, and the suppression of opposition (although socialist and anarchist critics experienced alternate persecution and semi-legality). The Party also continued to be racked by internal divisions. Many objected to the Brest Litovsk treaty in March 1918, which ceded vast tracts of Russia to Germany, and the Left Communists criticized the use of bourgeois ‘experts’ in government and army. The Workers' Opposition (1920-1) declared that the leadership had violated ‘the spirit of the Revolution’ and championed workers' control in industry. Meanwhile right-wing dissidents called for a prolonged period of state capitalism as Russia was not ready for socialism.

The end of the civil war marked the transition from a temporary dictatorship to a peacetime institutionalization of repression. The tenth Party Congress (1921) was a decisive event. The introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) coincided with the ban on factions and the bloody suppression of the Kronstadt rebels. Before his death in 1924, Lenin criticized the existence of ‘a workers' state with bureaucratic distortions’ and appealed unsuccessfully to Trotsky to work with him to oust Stalin whose role as head of the central Party apparatus gave him enormous power.

Bukharin and Stalin championed socialism in one country (retreat on the world stage, the enrichment of the peasantry, and the permanent retention of the NEP). Trotsky and the Left Opposition (1923-4) argued that this would destroy the socialist character of the Revolution and create a new ruling class. They advocated rapid industrialization to be financed by what Preobrazhensky termed ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ (the unequal exchange of resources between industry and agriculture to the benefit of the former). When Stalin and Bukharin launched the First Five Year Plan 1928 they adopted much of the left's programme although the latter would not have defended forced collectivization and the horrors this unleashed.

The Left Opposition offered the most trenchant critique of Stalinism in its description of the widening gap between party hierarchy and masses and the growing bureaucratization of soviet state and society. The social profile of the Party had changed qualitatively: the civil war decimated a generation of militants and the ‘Lenin Levy’ of 1924 swamped it with 240,000 career-minded new members. The Left Opposition represented the last serious challenge to Stalin. By 1929 he had removed the Bolshevik Old Guard from power and sent them to exile, prison, show trial, or execution.

Bolshevism may be characterized by strong organization, a commitment to world revolution, and a political practice guided by what Lenin called democratic centralism. Whether Bolshevism inevitably transmuted into Stalinism or whether historical circumstances caused the deformation is still in dispute.

— Geraldine Lievesley

Bolshevism was a dissenting movement within Russian Marxism before World War I that became the founding political party of the Soviet Union. The Russian word bolshevik means literally a person in the majority, as opposed to menshevik, a person in the minority. These words originated at the second party congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) that convened in 1903 in Brussels, then London. The dominant figure in the Bolshevik faction of the RSDWP was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1872 - 1924), more commonly known by his revolutionary name, Lenin.

Marxism was a radical ideology that predicted a revolution by the working classes that would seize power from the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904 - 1905 indeed precipitated a revolution, but the Romanov autocracy of Tsar Nicholas II survived by a combination of reform and repression. The RSDWP originally focused its efforts on the urban working classes in Russia, but Lenin and the Bolsheviks ultimately triumphed because they recognized the need to appeal to the poor peasantry as well.

Bolsheviks were divided between educated intellectuals and factory workers. Some became professional revolutionaries. Others became leaders of the labor movement and strikers in industrial workplaces. The professional revolutionaries favored an illegal conspiracy to seize power, tracing their roots to the Jacobins of the French Revolution and the Populist terrorists of the 1870s in Russia. The working-class Social Democrats favored a revolution that would benefit workers and their families, not intellectuals seeking power.

Russian Social Democrats were inspired by the spontaneous unrest that occurred in Russia in 1905 - strikes, peasant violence, and demands for a constitution and a parliament. Neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks played a leading role that year. The October Manifesto issued by the tsar promised a constitutional system with an elected parliament, or Duma. After these concessions, the government combined peasant land reform with bloody police repression to quiet the countryside.

After 1905, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks faced new choices. Should they participate in a bourgeois parliament such as the Duma? Or should they boycott its elections and recall their deputies? Should they focus on legal means of achieving power through the system? Or should they engage in illegal actions such as terror, bank robberies, and strikes? Should they limit themselves to the working classes in the towns? Or should they look for support in the peasantry as well?

The Bolsheviks were particularly attentive to the orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky in Germany and the radical syndicalism of Georges Sorel and others in France and Italy. Orthodox Marxists feared any revision of Karl Marx's ideas in favor of reform rather than revolution. The syndicalists believed in forming trade unions and convincing workers to believe in a future general strike. After 1905, the Bolsheviks were deeply divided between those who, like Lenin, claimed to be following Marxist scientific orthodoxy, and those who, like Alexander Bogdanov, believed Marxism was not a set of truths, but a set of useful myths that workers might be convinced to believe. Lenin, in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909), attacked Bogdanov's relativism.

The Bolsheviks fought over who should control the party faction's money and RSDWP schools for workers and revolutionaries in Paris, Bologna, and Capri. Lenin's followers in European exile argued with Bogdanov's followers inside Russia. Although the Bolshevik journal was called Pravda (Truth), the Bolsheviks by 1914 were a shrinking group of alienated intellectuals who could agree on little except for their old feud with the Mensheviks, who maintained better ties with factory workers.

When World War I broke out in 1914, there was no great general strike. Russian socialists were divided among defensists who patriotically supported their government at war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, and pacifists who wanted to end the war. Lenin wanted the war transformed into a revolution and civil war, then a workers' revolution. But most Russian socialists, exiled either in Europe or Siberia, hardly affected the war effort.

In 1917 the February Revolution surprised both the government and the revolutionaries. Nicholas II abdicated. A liberal Provisional Government shared power with radical workers' councils, known as soviets, that sprang up in the factories, farms, and army units. Returning from exile, Lenin and the Bolsheviks proclaimed war against the Provisional Government. As the unpopular great war dragged on, the Bolshevik program of workers' revolution and land reform gained them majorities in the soviets. By October, the Bolshevik-dominated soviets easily took power in the major cities from the weakened Provisional Government.

The Bolshevik Revolution did not end the dispute between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. Bogdanov led a proletarian culture movement popular among the masses for a few years. Leon Trotsky became a popular and independent leader of the new Red Army. And Josef Stalin quietly worked to create a single-party dictatorship that exiled or killed its enemies. By 1924 the Bolsheviks had become a party in their own right, first the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918, and then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1924. Ultimately the Bolsheviks led a massive and violent program of industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and purges that made the Soviet Union as autocratic and unpopular as its imperial predecessor.

Bibliography

Pomper, Phillip. (1990). Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia in Power. New York: Columbia University Press.

Service, Robert. (2000). Lenin. A Biography. London: Macmillan.

Sochor, Zenovia. (1988). Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Ulam, Adam. (1965). The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia. New York: Macmillan.

Williams, Robert C. (1986). The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and his Critics, 1904 - 1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

—ROBERT C. WILLIAMS

Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: a form of communism based on the writings of Marx and Lenin
  Synonyms: collectivism, Marxism-Leninism, Leninism, Marxism, sovietism

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - bolsjevisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
bolsjewisme

Français (French)
n. - Bolchévisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Bolschewismus, (Mehrheitsfraktion, seit 1918 die KPdSU)

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - μπολσεβικισμός

Italiano (Italian)
bolscevismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - bolchevismo (m), comunismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
большевизм

Español (Spanish)
n. - bolchevismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - bolsjevism

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
布尔什维克主义

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 布爾什維克主義

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 볼셰비키의 신조, 과격주의

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - ボルシェビキの政策, 共産主義, ボルシェビズム

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) بلشفيه, أحد أنواع الشيوعيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮בולשביזם‬

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