Bolshevism

[3][4] In October 1917, the Bolshevik Party won a majority in the revolutionary workers' councils (soviets) which had been formed throughout Russia following the February Revolution.

It subsequently organized the October Revolution, which overthrew the Provisional Government and replaced it with a state power under the control of the soviets, led by the Bolsheviks along with other left-wing socialists.

[10] Marx, similar to Lenin, considered it fundamentally irrelevant whether a bourgeois state was ruled according to a republican, parliamentarian, or constitutionally monarchic political system because this did not change the mode of production itself.

[14] Lenin had now concluded that the dictatorship of the proletariat would not alter the relationship of power between persons, but rather "transform their productive relations so that, in the long run, the realm of necessity could be overcome and, with that, genuine social freedom realised".

[15] By now, the party leaders believed that universal mass participation and true democracy could only take form in the last stage, if only because of Russia's current conditions at the time.

In early Bolshevik discourse, the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" was of little significance; the few times it was mentioned, it was likened to the form of government which had existed in the Paris Commune.

[15] With the ensuing Russian Civil War and the social and material devastation that followed, however, its meaning was transformed from communal democracy to disciplined totalitarian rule.

In the post-Soviet era even many Ukrainians, Georgians, and Armenians feel that their countries were forcibly annexed by the Bolsheviks, but this has been a problematic view because the pro-Soviet factions in these societies were once sizable as well.

The loss by imperialism of its dominating role in world affairs and the utmost expansion of the sphere in which the laws of socialist foreign policy operate are a distinctive feature of the present stage of social development.

[30] Lenin believed that international politics were dominated by class struggle, and Stalin stressed in the 1940s the growing polarization which was occurring in the capitalist and socialist systems.

[30] Also, with the establishment of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia, Soviet foreign policy-planners believed that capitalism had lost its dominance as an economic system.

[34] In it, Stalin stated, that he did not believe an inevitable conflict between the working class and the peasants would take place, further adding that "socialism in one country is completely possible and probable".

[34] Stalin held the view common amongst most Bolsheviks at the time; there was possibility of real success for socialism in the Soviet Union despite the country's backwardness and international isolation.

[34] While Grigoriy Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, together with Stalin, opposed Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, they diverged on how socialism could be built.

[36] In late 1925, Stalin received a letter from a party official which stated that his position of "Socialism in One Country" was in contradiction with Friedrich Engels own writings on the subject.

[36] Zinoviev on the other hand, disagreed with both Trotsky and Bukharin and Stalin, holding instead steadfast to Lenin's own position from 1917 to 1922, and continued to claim that only a defecting form of socialism could be constructed in the Soviet Union without a world revolution.

[37] Bukharin, by now, began arguing for the creation of an autarkic economic model, while Trotsky, in contrast, claimed that the Soviet Union had to participate in the international division of labour to develop.

Although in the subsequent history of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Lenin's supporters often found themselves in the minority, they were assigned the politically advantageous name "Bolsheviks".

[K 2][42] As Lenin's biographer Robert Service points out, the division of the newly created party into two factions "plunged Russian Marxists into a state of shock".

From the very beginning, while still abroad, Lenin insisted on the immediate break of the Petrograd Soviet with the Provisional Government in order to actively prepare for the transition from the bourgeois–democratic to the next, "proletarian" stage of the revolution, the seizure of power and the end of the war.

Returning to Russia, he came up with a new program of action for the Bolshevik party – the April Theses – in which he put on the agenda the demand for the transfer of all power to the Soviets in the interests of the proletariat and the poorest peasantry.

Faced with resistance even among the representatives of "theoretical", "scientific" Bolshevism, Lenin managed to overcome it, relying on the support of the lower classes – local party organizations, adherents of immediate practical action.

[47] In the course of the unfolding controversy about the possibility of socialism in Russia, Lenin rejected all the critical arguments of the Mensheviks, socialist revolutionaries and other political opponents about the country's unpreparedness for a socialist revolution due to its economic backwardness, weakness, lack of culture and organization of the working masses, including the proletariat, about the danger the split of the revolutionary democratic forces and the inevitability of a civil war.

Realizing the Leninist slogan "plunder the loot", the Bolsheviks en masse carried out a complete confiscation (expropriation) from the owners of private property, which they considered acquired through the exploitation of the working people, that is, the robbery of the workers.

[56] This is how the famous Social Democrat Alexander Parvus wrote about the topic in 1918:[57] The essence of Bolshevism is simple – to ignite the revolution everywhere, not choosing the time, regardless of the political situation and other historical realities.

[58] According to the British historian Orlando Figes, the opinion that the Bolsheviks were raised to the top of power by massive popular support for their party was not true.

Figes explains the success of the Bolsheviks by the fact that the latter were the only political party that uncompromisingly advocated the slogan "all power to the Soviets", which gained great popularity in 1917 after the unsuccessful Revolt of General Kornilov.

[60] Alexander Parvus wrote in 1918:[61] The present Soviets terrorize not only the reactionaries and capitalists, but also the democratically inclined bourgeoisie and even all socialist workers' organizations that disagree with their opinion.

They dispersed the Constituent Assembly and are holding on, having lost their moral authority in the eyes of the masses, exclusively with bayonets.The Bolsheviks were supported, although not without criticism of their political practice,[62][63] by left–wing theorists in Europe, such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Thus, the famous Social Democrat Alexander Parvus wrote in 1918:[75] If Marxism is a reflection of the social history of Western Europe, refracted through the prism of German philosophy, then Bolshevism is Marxism, emasculated by amateurs and refracted through the prism of Russian ignorance.According to the philosopher and linguist Nikolay Trubetskoy: The positive significance of Bolshevism may be that having removed the mask and showed everyone Satan in his undisguised form, he led many through confidence in the reality of Satan to faith in God.The authors of The Black Book of Communism note:[47] From the moment of its organizational formation in 1903, this party differed from all other currents of both Russian and world social democracy primarily by its voluntarist strategy of overthrowing the existing order and its concept of party organization – a rigidly structured, disciplined one, consisting of selected professional revolutionaries, parties are the antipode of vague mass parties, widely open to sympathizers, to the struggle of opinions and discussions, that is, the way the Russian Mensheviks and almost all European Social Democrats were.Russian President Vladimir Putin, answering questions in the Federation Council on June 27, 2012, accused the Bolshevik leadership of betraying national interests – "the Bolsheviks committed an act of national betrayal..." as a result of which Russia lost the First World War – "...the result of the betrayal of the then government".