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The Bolsheviks rose to prominence during World War I (1914-1918) as the war severely amplified Russia's internal problems, such as food shortages and abysmal development, and these issues led to Emperor Nicholas II abdicating (1917) before being executed (1918) during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922. (The other wing of the Party was made up of Mensheviks - "minoritarians", who were reformist and moderate.) 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The Bolsheviks rose to prominence during World War I (1914-1918) as the war severely amplified Russia's internal problems, such as food shortages and abysmal development, and these issues led to Emperor Nicholas II abdicating (1917) before being executed (1918) during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922. (The other wing of the Party was made up of Mensheviks - "minoritarians", who were reformist and moderate.) 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margin: 0 0 0.5em 0.5em; text-align:left; border: 1px solid #FF0000; width:175px;"> <tbody><tr> <td style="font-size: 95%; text-align:center; color:White; background-color:#FF0000"><b>Join the party!</b><br /><a href="/wiki/Communism" title="Communism"><font size="4" color="White"><b>Communism</b></font></a> </td></tr> <tr> <td style="background-color:#F9F5D8;" align="center"><a href="/wiki/Category:Communism" title="Category:Communism"><img alt="Icon communism.svg" src="/w/images/thumb/4/42/Icon_communism.svg/100px-Icon_communism.svg.png" decoding="async" width="100" height="100" srcset="/w/images/thumb/4/42/Icon_communism.svg/150px-Icon_communism.svg.png 1.5x, /w/images/thumb/4/42/Icon_communism.svg/200px-Icon_communism.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="200" data-file-height="200" /></a> </td></tr> <tr> <td style="font-size: 95%; color:White; background-color:#FF0000; text-align:center;"><b>Opiates for the masses</b> </td></tr> <tr> <td style="font-size: 95%; background-color:#F9F5D8;"> <ul><li><a href="/wiki/Trotskyism" class="mw-redirect" title="Trotskyism">Trotskyism</a></li> <li><a class="mw-selflink selflink">Bolshevism</a></li> <li><a href="/wiki/Maoism" title="Maoism">Maoism</a></li></ul> </td></tr> <tr> <td style="font-size: 95%; color:White; background-color:#FF0000; text-align:center;"><b>From each</b> </td></tr> <tr> <td style="font-size: 95%; background-color:#F9F5D8;"> <ul><li><a href="/wiki/Tony_Cliff" title="Tony Cliff">Tony Cliff</a></li> <li><a href="/wiki/Andrew_Murray" title="Andrew Murray">Andrew Murray</a></li> <li><a href="/wiki/Pol_Pot" title="Pol Pot">Pol Pot</a></li></ul> </td></tr> <tr> <td style="font-size: 95%; color:White; background-color:#FF0000; text-align:center;"><b>To each</b> </td></tr> <tr> <td style="font-size: 95%; background-color:#F9F5D8;"> <ul><li><a href="/wiki/Maoism" title="Maoism">Maoism</a></li> <li><a href="/wiki/Bourgeois_pseudoscience" title="Bourgeois pseudoscience">Bourgeois pseudoscience</a></li> <li><a href="/wiki/Red_Army_Faction" title="Red Army Faction">Red Army Faction</a></li> <li><a href="/wiki/False_consciousness" title="False consciousness">False consciousness</a></li> <li><a href="/wiki/Uyghur_genocide" title="Uyghur genocide">Uyghur genocide</a></li> <li><a href="/wiki/North_Korea" title="North Korea">North Korea</a></li></ul> <div class="vte plainlinks" style="font-size:smaller; text-align:center;"><a href="/wiki/Template:Communism" title="Template:Communism">v</a> - <a href="/wiki/Template_talk:Communism" title="Template talk:Communism">t</a> - <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Communism&action=edit">e</a></div> </td></tr></tbody></table> <table class="messagebox mb-brainwatermark mb-warning-orange" style=""> <tbody><tr> <td class="mb-image"><a href="/wiki/File:Warning_icon_orange.svg" class="image"><img alt="Warning icon orange.svg" src="/w/images/thumb/4/4f/Warning_icon_orange.svg/50px-Warning_icon_orange.svg.png" decoding="async" width="50" height="50" srcset="/w/images/thumb/4/4f/Warning_icon_orange.svg/75px-Warning_icon_orange.svg.png 1.5x, /w/images/thumb/4/4f/Warning_icon_orange.svg/100px-Warning_icon_orange.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="400" data-file-height="400" /></a> </td> <td class="mb-text"><b>This page contains too many unsourced statements and needs to be improved</b>. <hr /> <p><b>Bolshevik</b> could use some help. Please research the article's assertions. Whatever is credible should be sourced, and what is not should be removed. </p> </td></tr></tbody></table> <table style="margin: auto; border-collapse:collapse; border-style:none; background-color:transparent;" class="cquote"> <tbody><tr> <td><div style="padding:4px 50px;position:relative;"><span style="position:absolute;left:10px;top:-6px;z-index:1;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-weight:bold;color:#B2B7F2;font-size:36px">“</span><span style="position:absolute;right:10px;bottom:-20px;z-index:1;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-weight:bold;color:#B2B7F2;font-size:36px">”</span>"The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials."</div> </td></tr> <tr> <td style="padding:4px 10px 8px;font-size:smaller;line-height:1.6em;text-align:right;"><cite style="font-style:normal;position:relative;z-index:2">—George Orwell, <i>Wells, Hitler and the World State</i></cite> </td></tr></tbody></table> <p><b>Bolshevik</b> (Russian: большевик <i>bol'shevik</i>) was the name given to members of one of the two largest factions of the <a href="/wiki/Russia" title="Russia">Russian</a> Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) when the Party split (1903) into two factions before the 1917 <a href="/wiki/October_Revolution" title="October Revolution">October Revolution</a>. The Bolsheviks rose to prominence during <a href="/wiki/World_War_I" title="World War I">World War I</a> (1914-1918) as the war severely amplified Russia's internal problems, such as food shortages and abysmal development, and these issues led to Emperor Nicholas II abdicating (1917) before being executed (1918) during the <a href="/wiki/Russian_Civil_War" title="Russian Civil War">Russian Civil War</a> of 1917-1922. (The other wing of the Party was made up of Mensheviks - "minoritarians", who were reformist and moderate.) During the First <a href="/wiki/Red_Scare" class="mw-redirect" title="Red Scare">Red Scare</a> of 1919-1920, and to this day, <a href="/wiki/Communism" title="Communism">communism</a> is occasionally <s>smeared as</s> called "Bolshevism". </p><p>Mostly made up of workers, the Bolsheviks wanted to end Russia's involvement in World War I and eventually did this by signing the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which gave <a href="/wiki/Germany" title="Germany">Germany</a> and Austria-Hungary a good chunk of Russia's territory in exchange for peace.<sup id="cite_ref-1" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup> A famous slogan emphasizing what the Bolsheviks were poised to implement was "Peace, Land, and Bread"; "Peace" meant the end Russia's involvement in World War I, "Land" meant land redistribution for peasants, and "bread" referred to the end of food shortages that were rampant throughout Russia at the time.<sup id="cite_ref-2" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-2">[2]</a></sup> Eventually the Bolsheviks renamed themselves as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and ran Russia Inc. until 1991 under the aegis of more sophisticated slogans like "democratic centralism" and "building socialism". </p><p>The word "Bolshevik" itself stems from the Russian adjective большой (tr: <i>bol'shoy</i>), literally meaning "big", or from the noun большинство (tr: <i>bol'shinstvo</i>) meaning "majority", and it simply means "majoritarian" in this context. The Bolsheviks were originally nicknamed so after a split of the original Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSDRP" class="extiw" title="wp:RSDRP" rel="nofollow"><span style="color:#477979 !important;" title="Wikipedia: RSDRP">RSDRP</span></a><sup><img alt="" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Wikipedia%27s_W.svg/12px-Wikipedia%27s_W.svg.png" decoding="async" width="12" height="12" srcset="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Wikipedia%27s_W.svg/18px-Wikipedia%27s_W.svg.png 1.5x, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Wikipedia%27s_W.svg/24px-Wikipedia%27s_W.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="128" data-file-height="128" /></sup>) before the <a href="/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution" title="1905 Russian Revolution">1905 Russian Revolution</a>. The split was driven by differences in strategies of class alliances; the Mensheviks favored alliances with the bourgeoisie to overthrow the Tsarist aristocracy, while the Bolsheviks favored alliances with the peasants. <a href="/wiki/Lenin" class="mw-redirect" title="Lenin">Lenin</a>'s faction was perceived to have enjoyed a majority over Martov's faction (the Mensheviks, or minoritarians). The Bolsheviks didn't retain their majority in numbers for long, but already had the name and thus the PR boost that comes with being "the majority". </p><p>Bolsheviks enjoy <a href="/wiki/Trotsky" class="mw-redirect" title="Trotsky"> snowball</a> fights and overthrowing <a href="/wiki/Tsar" title="Tsar">tsars</a>. This type of activity led to a new <a href="/wiki/British" class="mw-redirect" title="British">British</a> slang word <i>bolshy</i>, meaning "stroppy" or "uncooperative".<sup id="cite_ref-3" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup> </p><p>The <a href="/wiki/Alt-right" title="Alt-right">alt-right</a> enjoys bringing up Bolsheviks in conversation frequently, because a number of the Bolshevik leaders were <a href="/wiki/Jewish" class="mw-redirect" title="Jewish">Jewish</a>. The reason for this was, obviously, not some kind of conspiracy, but the fact that Jews suffered discrimination in Imperial Russia (along with other ethnic minorities), were prohibited from living in the countryside or in the eastern provinces (thus concentrating in the big cities in western Russia, including the capital), were on average better educated than ethnic Russians, and therefore were more likely to express political dissent and to join various political movements in opposition to monarchists. </p><p>Bolshevism is where oligarchs<sup id="cite_ref-4" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-4">[4]</a></sup> go to <a href="/wiki/Business" class="mw-redirect" title="Business">business</a>-school. </p> <div id="toc" class="toc" role="navigation" aria-labelledby="mw-toc-heading"><input type="checkbox" role="button" id="toctogglecheckbox" class="toctogglecheckbox" style="display:none" /><div class="toctitle" lang="en" dir="ltr"><h2 id="mw-toc-heading">Contents</h2><span class="toctogglespan"><label class="toctogglelabel" for="toctogglecheckbox"></label></span></div> <ul> <li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1"><a href="#Bad_stuff"><span class="tocnumber">1</span> <span class="toctext">Bad stuff</span></a></li> <li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2"><a href="#Popular_culture"><span class="tocnumber">2</span> <span class="toctext">Popular culture</span></a></li> <li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3"><a href="#See_also"><span class="tocnumber">3</span> <span class="toctext">See also</span></a></li> <li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4"><a href="#References"><span class="tocnumber">4</span> <span class="toctext">References</span></a></li> </ul> </div> <h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Bad_stuff">Bad stuff</span><span class="mw-editsection"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket">[</span><a href="/w/index.php?title=Bolshevik&action=edit&section=1" title="Edit section: Bad stuff">edit</a><span class="mw-editsection-bracket">]</span></span></h2> <p>However, the bolsheviks have committed war crimes against Soviet dissenters, such as the Red Terror. In addition, they also slaughtered the Russian royal family (being anti-monarchy doesn't mean homicide is the answer or solution).<sup id="cite_ref-5" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-5">[5]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-6" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-6">[6]</a></sup> </p><p>The Bolsheviks also outlawed opposition groups that weren’t allied with communism/socialism (or rather their specific interpretation of communism/socialism, which deviated significantly from the vision Marx had in which communism was dominant with no need of fearing opposition, only relying on populism from support of the masses, particularly the working class).<sup id="cite_ref-7" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-7">[7]</a></sup> </p> <h2><span class="mw-headline" id="Popular_culture">Popular culture</span><span class="mw-editsection"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket">[</span><a href="/w/index.php?title=Bolshevik&action=edit&section=2" title="Edit section: Popular culture">edit</a><span class="mw-editsection-bracket">]</span></span></h2> <p>In George Orwell's <i><a href="/wiki/George_Orwell#Nineteen_Eighty-Four_.281949.29" title="George Orwell">1984</a></i>, the driving ideology of the superstate of Eurasia is said to be "Neo-Bolshevism" and indistinguishable in all but name of the "Ingsoc" practiced in Oceania. </p><p>In the late 1980s, the World Wrestling Federation had a tag team called the Bolsheviks, featuring Nikolai Volkoff (not a Russian, but rather a Croatian, though famous for singing the Soviet national anthem to the ire of audiences) and Boris Zhukov (an American). The Bolsheviks lost all the time until they broke up in the summer of 1990, when the impending collapse of the Soviet Union encouraged them to briefly run Volkoff as American-loving babyface. </p> <h2><span class="mw-headline" id="See_also">See also</span><span class="mw-editsection"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket">[</span><a href="/w/index.php?title=Bolshevik&action=edit&section=3" title="Edit section: See also">edit</a><span class="mw-editsection-bracket">]</span></span></h2> <ul><li><a href="/w/index.php?title=Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Communist Party of the Soviet Union (page does not exist)">Communist Party of the Soviet Union</a> - their successor.</li> <li><a href="/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Russia" class="mw-redirect" title="Communist Party of Russia">Communist Party of Russia</a> - their secondary successor after their primary successor.</li> <li><a href="/wiki/United_Russia" title="United Russia">United Russia</a> - a big tent party that adopted some of the anti-western and Russian nationalist ideals from the Bolsheviks.</li></ul> <h2><span class="mw-headline" id="References">References</span><span class="mw-editsection"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket">[</span><a href="/w/index.php?title=Bolshevik&action=edit&section=4" title="Edit section: References">edit</a><span class="mw-editsection-bracket">]</span></span></h2> <div class="references-small" style="font-size:90%;"> <div class="mw-references-wrap"><ol class="references"> <li id="cite_note-1"><span class="mw-cite-backlink"><a href="#cite_ref-1">↑</a></span> <span class="reference-text"><a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bolshevik">https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bolshevik</a></span> </li> <li id="cite_note-2"><span class="mw-cite-backlink"><a href="#cite_ref-2">↑</a></span> <span class="reference-text"><a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/museum/his1e.htm">http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/museum/his1e.htm</a></span> </li> <li id="cite_note-3"><span class="mw-cite-backlink"><a href="#cite_ref-3">↑</a></span> <span class="reference-text"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bolshy">Bolshy</a>, Dictionary.com</span> </li> <li id="cite_note-4"><span class="mw-cite-backlink"><a href="#cite_ref-4">↑</a></span> <span class="reference-text">See the <a href="/wiki/Wikipedia" title="Wikipedia">Wikipedia</a> article on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch" class="extiw" title="wp:Russian oligarch" rel="nofollow">Russian oligarch</a>.</span> </li> <li id="cite_note-5"><span class="mw-cite-backlink"><a href="#cite_ref-5">↑</a></span> <span class="reference-text"><a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-unbearable-brutality-of-the-bolsheviks/">https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-unbearable-brutality-of-the-bolsheviks/</a></span> </li> <li id="cite_note-6"><span class="mw-cite-backlink"><a href="#cite_ref-6">↑</a></span> <span class="reference-text"><a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY00FF7HLZY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY00FF7HLZY</a></span> </li> <li id="cite_note-7"><span class="mw-cite-backlink"><a href="#cite_ref-7">↑</a></span> <span class="reference-text"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1921-2/tenth-party-congress/tenth-party-congress-texts/lenin-outlaws-the-party-opposition/">Lenin Outlaws the Party Opposition</a> Soviet History</span> </li> </ol></div></div> <div role="note" class="plainlinks stubtemplate" style="margin:auto; text-align:center; background-color: #f9f9f9; padding: .5em; border: 1px solid #aaa; width: 300px; 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