What was the Bolshevik Party?

The Word Bolshevik means in Russian "majority", they formed as a group at the 1903 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party conference in London. They were the radical Marxists while the Mensheviks, "minority", were the moderates. The Bolsheviks were lead by Lenin and grew to a considerable size in 1917. In October, November by our calendar, of 1917 they overthrew the Menshevik government which came to power in the Febuary Revolution and was in the eyes of the majority of Russian workers not much better than the Tsar. After the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks (now the Communist Party) started to see the party become a bureacratic nightmare, Lenin tried to reverse this but he died with most of the leaders of the party ignoring his calls for radical reform.