M.L.S.R.

Bolshevik

The Bolsheviks (Russian: большевики, bolsheviki; from большинство, bolshinstvo, 'majority'), led by Vladimir Lenin, were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the Second Party Congress in 1903. The Bolshevik party seized power in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917, and was later renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Their ideology and practices, based on Leninist and later Marxist–Leninist principles, are known as Bolshevism. The origin of the split was Lenin's support for a smaller party of professional revolutionaries, as opposed to the Menshevik desire for a broad party membership. The influence of the two factions fluctuated in the years up to 1912, when the RSDLP formal… more »