In 1912 Lenin, leading a very small minority, formed a distinct Bolshevik organization, decisively (although not formally) splitting the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party. His determination to keep his own faction strictly organized, however, had also alienated many of his Bolshevik colleagues, who had wished to undertake nonrevolutionary activities or who had disagreed with Lenin on political tactics and on the infallibility of orthodox Marxism. No outstanding Russian Social Democrats joined Lenin in 1912.
Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks became increasingly popular among urban workers and soldiers in Russia after the February Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917) (1917), particularly after April, when Lenin returned to the country, demanding immediate peace and that the workers' councils, or Soviets, assume power. By October the Bolsheviks had majorities in the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and Moscow Soviets; and when they overthrew the Provisional Government, the second Congress of Soviets (devoid of peasant deputies) approved the action and formally took control of the government.
Immediately after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks refused to share power with other revolutionary groups, with the exception of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries; eventually they suppressed all rival political organizations. They changed their name to Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) in March 1918; to All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) in December 1925; and to Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Menshevik
▪ political party, Russia
(Russian: One of the Minority),plural Mensheviks, or Mensheviki,
member of the non-Leninist wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, which evolved into a separate organization. It originated when a dispute over party membership requirements arose at the 1903 congress of the Social-Democratic Party. One group, led by L. Martov, opposed Lenin's (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) plan for a party restricted to professional revolutionaries and called for a mass party modelled after western European social-democratic parties.
When Lenin's followers obtained a temporary majority on the central committee and on the editorial board of the newspaper Iskra, they appropriated for themselves the name Bolshevik (Those of the Majority); Martov and his followers became the Mensheviks. After the 1903 congress the differences between the two factions grew. In addition to disapproving of Lenin's emphasis on the dictatorial role of a highly centralized party, the Mensheviks maintained that the proletariat could not (nor should it) dominate a bourgeois revolution; therefore, unlike the Bolsheviks, they were willing to work with the bourgeois left to establish a liberal, capitalist regime, which they considered to be a necessary precursor to a Socialist society. They played active roles in the 1905 revolution, particularly in the St. Petersburg soviet, but afterward, like the Bolsheviks, they participated in the Dumas (parliaments), believing their success to be a step toward the creation of a democratic government. In 1912 the Social-Democratic Party was definitively split by Lenin; in 1914 the Mensheviks themselves became divided in their attitudes toward World War I.
Although they assumed leading roles in the soviets and provisional governments, created after the February Revolution (1917), and formally set up their own party in August, they were not sufficiently united to maintain a dominant position in the political developments of 1917. After the Bolshevik Revolution (October), they attempted to form a legal opposition but in 1922 were permanently suppressed; many Mensheviks went into exile.
Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party
▪ political party, Russia
Russian Rossiyskaya Sotsial-demokraticheskaya Rabochaya Partiya,
Marxist revolutionary party ancestral to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Founded in 1898 in Minsk, the Social-Democratic Party held that Russia could achieve socialism only after developing a bourgeois society with an urban proletariat. It rejected the populist idea that the peasant commune, or mir, could be the basis of a socialist society that could bypass the capitalist stage.
Most of the leaders elected at the founding congress were soon arrested. The second congress, in Brussels and London in July–August 1903, was dominated by the argument between the Bolshevik wing of the party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Menshevik wing, led by L. Martov, over Lenin's proposals for a party composed of disciplined professional revolutionaries. Georgy Plekhanov, one of the founders of Russian Marxism, took a generally middle position. This argument dominated the internal life of the party. Party members played a major role in the unsuccessful Russian Revolution of 1905, in which one Social-Democratic leader, Leon Trotsky, was elected president of the St. Petersburg Soviet. In the turmoil of 1917 the Bolsheviks broke definitively with their Menshevik rivals and, after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, changed their name to the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). Their rivals, the Mensheviks, were finally suppressed after the end of the Russian Civil War.
Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich
▪ Russian anarchist
Introduction
born May 30 [May 18, Old Style], 1814, Premukhino, Russia
died July 1 [June 19], 1876, Bern, Switzerland
chief propagator of 19th-century anarchism, a prominent Russian revolutionary agitator, and a prolific political writer. His quarrel with Karl Marx (Marx, Karl) split the anarchist and Marxist wings of the revolutionary socialist movement for many years after their deaths.
Early life
Bakunin was the eldest son of a small landowner in the province of Tver. His lifetime of revolt began when he was sent to the Artillery School in St. Petersburg and later was posted to a military unit on the Polish frontier. In 1835 he absented himself without leave and resigned his commission, an action for which he narrowly escaped arrest for desertion. During the next five years he divided his time between Premukhino, where he plunged into the study of the German philosophers Johann Fichte (Fichte, Johann Gottlieb) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich), and Moscow, where he moved in the literary circles of the critic Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich), the novelist Ivan Turgenev (Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich), and the publicist Aleksandr Herzen (Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich). In 1840, with his opinions still in a fluid and turbulent state, he journeyed to Berlin to complete his education. There he fell under the spell of the Young Hegelians, the radical followers of Hegel. After moving to Dresden, Bakunin published his first revolutionary credo in a radical journal in 1842, ending with a now-famous aphorism: “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” This brought him a peremptory order to return to Russia and, on his refusal, the loss of his passport. After brief periods in Switzerland and Belgium, Bakunin settled in Paris, where he consorted with French and German Socialists, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph) and Karl Marx (Marx, Karl), and numerous Polish émigrés who inspired him to combine the cause of the national liberation of the Slav peoples with that of social revolution. The February Revolution of 1848 (1848, Revolutions of) in Paris gave him his first taste of street fighting, and after a few days of eager participation he traveled eastward in the hope of fanning the flames of revolution in Germany and Poland. In Prague in June 1848, he attended the Slav (Pan-Slavism) congress, which ended when Austrian troops bombarded the city. Later that year, in the secure retreat of Anhalt-Köthen in Germany, he wrote his first major manifesto, An Appeal to the Slavs, in which he denounced the bourgeoisie as a spent counterrevolutionary force, called for the overthrow of the Habsburg (Habsburg, House of) Empire and the creation in central Europe of a free federation of Slav peoples, and counted on the peasant—especially the Russian peasant—with his tradition of violent revolt, as the agent of the coming revolution.