Bolsheviks

The translation of the Russian word Большевик meaning majority. The main representative of the Bolsheviks was Lenin.

The Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, founded in March 1898, held its Second Congress in Brussels (later transferred to London) from July 17 to August 10, 1903. The main agenda of the congress was to discuss and adopt the party programme, the party constitution, and elect the central committee of the party. During the Congress, the Marxists led by Lenin had a fierce struggle with the opportunists such as Martov. The Congress ultimately adopted the party programme proposed by the Iskraists headed by Lenin with the goal of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Furthermore, in the election of the candidates for the central committee and the editorial board of Iskra, the Leninists gained the majority. From then on, those who supported Lenin were called Bolsheviks (Majority faction) and those who opposed Lenin were called Mensheviks (Minority faction). The formation of Bolsheviks also marked the birth of Leninism. In January 1912, the Sixth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party held in Prague passed a resolution to expel the Mensheviks from the party, and from then on, the Bolsheviks became an independent new proletarian party.

The views of Bolsheviks mainly included the following aspects: (1) On the question of the party's organizational principles, it advocated that the party was an advanced and organized force of the working class, a disciplined whole which consisted organizations at central and local levels, and that the Party is highest form of organization among all organizations of the working class. Therefore, a highly centralized, strictly class-oriented, politically independent Marxist party should be established so as to lead the revolution to victory. (2) On the question of the leadership and the future of the revolution, it advocated that the proletariat had the mission of playing a leading role in the general democratic revolutionary movement in Russia, and that in order to make the revolution meet the independent demands of the proletariat to the maximum extent possible, it was necessary to spare no effort to strive for the leadership of the workers in the revolution, and not just become the tail of the events. After the victory of the revolution, the proletariat had to rely on the force of armed uprising to immediately establish a revolutionary provisional government without losing time and to implement the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. (3) On the question of the tactics of struggle, the Bolsheviks opposed the Mensheviks' peaceful and legal way of parliamentary struggle and the opportunist line of reform. Lenin held that the realization of the benefits of reform, which the proletariat and the peasantry urgently needed, would undoubtedly provoke a desperate revolt of the landowners, the big bourgeoisie and the Tsarist system. To cope with and destroy such a revolt, it was necessary to rely on the violent revolutionary and insurrectionary struggle of the armed masses, i.e., to break counter-revolutionary attempts by means of dictatorship. The path of revolution is the path of rapid incision and direct excision of the corrupt organism, otherwise, the reform will only prolong the time and cause the slow necrosis of the corrupt part of the people's organism and all kinds of suffering. (4) On the question of the relationship with the peasantry, Lenin regarded the peasants as the ally of the working class. The Russian peasants were an important force exploited by the feudal system. Therefore, only by calling on the peasants, awakened by the revolutionary education, to join the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, could the Russian revolution take on a real scale. On the contrary, the big bourgeoisie, the landlords and the workshop owners, because of their selfish and narrow mentality, were unavoidably timid and unable to make the needed vigorous effort to complete the revolution. Therefore, only the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the people, that is, the proletariat and the peasantry in alliance, could be integrated into a great force and thus complete victory over the Tzar system could be achieved. As Lenin said: the proletariat must carry the democratic revolution to full fledged completion, allying to itself the mass of the peasantry in order to crush the autocracy’s resistance by force and paralyse the bourgeoisie’s instability. The proletariat must accomplish the socialist revolution, allying to itself the mass of the semi-proletarian elements of the population, so as to crush the bourgeoisie’s resistance by force and paralyse the instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie. The tasks of the proletariat were defined as above. (5) On the question of the transition from the democratic revolution to the proletarian revolution, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin proposed that after the victory of the bourgeois democratic revolution, the forces should have been consolidated and no time lost in transforming the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. According to Lenin, the process of the Russian revolution was to be carried out in two steps, the first being the bourgeois-democratic revolution that overthrew the Tsarist feudal autocracy, and the second being the socialist revolution that overthrew the bourgeois rule. Although their respective goals and tasks were different, they were like two links of a chain. After the first step, the contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the expansion of productive forces and capitalist relations of production would definitely become the main contradictions of the society. Therefore, the end of the democratic revolution meant the beginning of the socialist revolution. In the struggle against imperialism, against reactionaries, revisionism and the Second International opportunism, the Bolsheviks led the Russian people to transform socialism from an ideal to a reality for the first time, and furthermore, developed the Marxist theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The ideology of Bolsheviks became known as Bolshevism, and Bolshevism became one of the synonyms of Marxism in time.