LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Bolshevik: Bolshevik Revolution
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The Bolshevik revolution confirmed anarchist theory that a "workers' state" is a contraction in terms. For anarchists, the Bolshevik substitution of party power for workers power (and the conflict between the two) did not come as a surprise. The state is the delegation of power -- as such, it means that the idea of a "workers' state" expressing "workers' power" is a logical impossibility. If workers are running society then power rests in their hands. If a state exists then power rests in the hands of the handful of people at the top, not in the hands of all. The state was designed for minority rule.
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For the time being the Bolshevik revolution was secure. But opposition to the Bolshevik takeover was organizing. Pockets of hostility to the Bolsheviks remained, some in Cossack areas. And Latvia, Estonia and Finland declared their independence. Leaders of the Petrograd Soviet, dominated by Lenin, continued to rule by decree, in the name of "the people." The Petrograd Soviet ordered postal employees, telegraph operators and railway employees back to work. Postal and telegraph workers who did not recognize the authority of the new Soviet government were to be dismissed from their positions without benefit of their pensions.
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The crisis inside the Bolshevik Party was indeed sharp. At different times, Bukharin, Radek, Volodarskii and Riazanov led the “Left Communist” fraction which believed that a revolutionary war with imperialism must be pursued at all costs, up to and including the sacrifice of the revolution in Russia. The Left SRs ... thought that yielding to Germany’s predatory territorial demands would be a colossal betrayal of the revolution. The debates within the Bolshevik Party and with other parties were tense and acrimonious. Trotsky, meanwhile, doubted that Germany could resume a military offensive due to domestic unrest; he hoped that the Bolsheviks could declare “no war, no peace,” and walk away from the negotiations, stalling for as much time as possible. The Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee agreed to this tactic on January 11, and the next day the Left SRs also endorsed it. Even Martov, despite his bitter opposition to the Bolsheviks, could not restrain his admiration of the revolutionary élan with which Trotsky had championed the anti-imperialist cause at the negotiations in Brest Litovsk.
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A Bolshevik ("Большевик", derived from Russian word loosely translated as "majority") was a member of a faction of Bolsheviks of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) led by Vladimir Lenin. The other faction was known as the Mensheviks, derived from "minority". The split occurred at the Second Party Congress in 1903. Shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power during the Russian Revolution of 1917, they changed their name to the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918 and were generally known as the Communist Party after that point. However, it was not until 1952 that the party, which since the 1930s had been the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), formally dropped the word Bolshevik from its name.
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Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, returned to Petrograd in April 1917 from his wartime residence in Switzerland. Although he had been born into a noble family, from his youth Lenin espoused the cause of the common workers. A committed revolutionary and pragmatic Marxist thinker, he astounded the Bolsheviks in Petrograd with his April Theses , in which he boldly called for the overthrow of the Provisional Government, the transfer of "all power to the soviets," and the expropriation of factories by workers and of land belonging to the church, the nobility, and the gentry by peasants. Lenin's dynamic presence quickly won the other Bolshevik leaders to his position, and the radicalized orientation of the Bolshevik faction attracted new members.
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A decade later, with Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika well under way and the Soviet Union in its death throes, the celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution seemed little more than self-delusion. The Soviet Union saw four more Red Square parades in honor of the revolution before collapsing in 1991. The newly formed Russian Federation scaled down the festivities and renamed the holiday Accord and Reconciliation Day.
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Bolshevik Revolution