Bolshevism

Bolshevism (derived from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist Soviet Leninist, and later Marxist–Leninist, current of political thought and political regime that is associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, and is focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Bolshevism originated at the beginning of the 20th century in the Russian Empire, and was associated with the activities of the Bolshevik faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party led by Vladimir Lenin, Bolshevism's main theorist. Other theoreticians included Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. While Bolshevism was based on Marxist philosophy, it also absorbed elements of the ideology and practice of the socialist revolutionaries of the second half of the 19th century, such as Sergey Nechaev, Pyotr Tkachev, and Nikolay Chernyshevsky, and was influenced by Russian agrarian socialist movements like the Narodniks. 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. Some researchers attribute to Bolshevik theory the program of Joseph Stalin, who headed the All–Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and at the same time possessed full state power in the Soviet Union. However, others (both Stalin's contemporaries and later) do not confuse "Bolshevism" and "Stalinism" proper, considering them to be multidirectional (revolutionary and thermidorian) phenomena. The expression "Bolshevism", and later "Communism", has become established in Western historiography in the sense of a certain set of features of Soviet power in a certain political period. The Bolshevik Party retained the moniker...