Bolshevik

The meeting of the soviet after the revolution in Petrograd in March 1917. This was the first of two revolutions that took place in Russia that year.

Bolsheviks, the majority in the early Russian Social Democratic Party, believed that the Russian workers needed leaders who were professional revolutionaries. It was the Bolsheviks, under Lenin, in the centre of this photograph between Stalin on the left and Leon Trotsky, who led the revolution in 1917.

Member of the majority of the Russian Social Democratic Party who split from the Mensheviks in 1903. The Bolsheviks, under Lenin, advocated the destruction of capitalist political and economic institutions, and the setting up of a socialist state with power in the hands of the workers. The Bolsheviks set the Russian Revolution of 1917 in motion. They changed their name to the Russian Communist Party in 1918.

They maintained power after the Civil War 1918-1921.