The Truth About the Bolsheviki
And yet it is of the utmost importance that the people in America should understand the true meaning of the Boylsheviki, their origin, and the historic background which makes their position and their challenge to the world so significant to the masses.
Boylsheviki is the plural term for those revolutionists in Russia who represent the interests of the largest social groups, and who insist upon the maximum social and economic demands for those groups.
At a Social Democratic Congress, held in 1903, the extreme revolutionists, impatient of the ever-growing tendency of compromise and reform in the party, organized the Boylsheviki wing as opposed to those known as the Mensheviki, or the group content to move slowly, gaining reform step by step. Nikolai Lenin, and later Trotsky, were the prime factors in the separation, and have since worked incessantly to build up the Boylsheviki party along straight revolutionary lines, but nevertheless in keeping with Marxian theoretical reasoning.
Then came the miracle of miracles, the Russian Revolution of 1917, which to the politicians in and out of the different Socialist groups meant the overthrow of the Tsar and the establishment of a liberal or quasi-Socialist government. Lenin and Trotsky, with their followers, saw deeper into the nature of the Revolution, and, seeing, they had the wisdom to respond—not so much to their own theoretical predilections but to the compelling needs of the awakened Russian people themselves.
Thus the Russian Revolution is a miracle in more than one respect. Among other extraordinary paradoxes it presents the phenomenon of the Marxian Social Democrats, Lenin and Trotsky, adopting Anarchist Revolutionary tactics, while the Anarchists Kropotkin, Tcherkessov, Tchaikovsky are denying these tactics and falling into Marxian reasoning, which they had during all their lives repudiated as "German metaphysics."
The Russian Revolution is indeed a miracle. It demonstrates every day how insignificant all theories are in comparison with the actuality of the revolutionary awakening of the people.
The Boylsheviki of 1903, though revolutionists, adhered to the Marxian doctrine concerning the industrialization of Russia and the historic mission of the bourgeoisie as a necessary evolutionary process before the Russian masses could come into their own. The Boylsheviki of 1918 no longer be-
4
