however, rivalry between Bolotnikov and another rebel commander, Istoma Pashkov, led to Pashkov’s betrayal of the rebels during a decisive battle on December 2, 1606. Forced to break off the siege, Bolotnikov retreated in good order to Kaluga, where his skillful defense of the fortress frustrated all efforts by Shuisky’s commanders to capture the town. After breaking up the siege of Kaluga, Bolot-nikov led his men to stone-walled Tula to link up with other rebel forces. Soon Tula came under siege, but once again Bolotnikov’s skill and energy frustrated his enemies. Eventually, Tsar Vasily’s army built a dam below Tula and flooded the town, forcing the rebels to surrender on October 10, 1607.
Bolotnikov managed to negotiate good terms for the rebels. He gave himself up, but his men (with their weapons) were allowed to go free. Many of them immediately rejoined the civil war against Shuisky by entering the service of the second False Dmitry. Bolotnikov was taken in chains to Moscow as a trophy of Tsar Vasily’s victory over the rebels. He was then transferred to Kar-gopol in north Russia, where he was blinded and drowned in early 1608. So great was his reputation that even some of Shuisky’s supporters privately criticized the tsar for executing the brilliant rebel leader. See also: DMITRY, FALSE; MNISZECH, MARINA; PUGACHEV, EMELIAN IVANOVICH; SERFDOM; SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH; SLAVERY; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Avrich, Paul. (1972). Russian Rebels, 1600-1800. New York: Schocken Books. Bussow, Conrad. (1994). The Disturbed State of the Russian Realm, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s. Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Skrynnikov, Ruslan. (1988). The Time of Troubles: Russia in Crisis, 1604-1618, tr. Hugh Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
Bolshevism was a dissenting movement within Russian Marxism before World War I that became the founding political party of the Soviet Union. The Russian word bolshevik means literally a person in the majority, as opposed to menshevik, a person in the minority. These words originated at
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the second party congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) that convened in 1903 in Brussels, then London. The dominant figure in the Bolshevik faction of the RSDWP was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1872-1924), more commonly known by his revolutionary name, Lenin.
Marxism was a radical ideology that predicted a revolution by the working classes that would seize power from the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 indeed precipitated a revolution, but the Romanov autocracy of Tsar Nicholas II survived by a combination of reform and repression. The RSDWP originally focused its efforts on the urban working classes in Russia, but Lenin and the Bolsheviks ultimately triumphed because they recognized the need to appeal to the poor peasantry as well.
Bolsheviks were divided between educated intellectuals and factory workers. Some became professional revolutionaries. Others became leaders of the labor movement and strikers in industrial workplaces. The professional revolutionaries favored an illegal conspiracy to seize power, tracing their roots to the Jacobins of the French Revolution and the Populist terrorists of the 1870s in Russia. The working-class Social Democrats favored a revolution that would benefit workers and their families, not intellectuals seeking power.
Russian Social Democrats were inspired by the spontaneous unrest that occurred in Russia in 1905-strikes, peasant violence, and demands for a constitution and a parliament. Neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks played a leading role that year. The October Manifesto issued by the tsar promised a constitutional system with an elected parliament, or Duma. After these concessions, the government combined peasant land reform with bloody police repression to quiet the countryside.
After 1905, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks faced new choices. Should they participate in a bourgeois parliament such as the Duma? Or should they boycott its elections and recall their deputies? Should they focus on legal means of achieving power through the system? Or should they engage in illegal actions such as terror, bank robberies, and strikes? Should they limit themselves to the working classes in the towns? Or should they look for support in the peasantry as well?
The Bolsheviks were particularly attentive to the orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky in Germany and the radical syndicalism of Georges Sorel and others in France and Italy. Orthodox Marxists feared any revision of Karl Marx’s ideas in favor of reform rather than revolution. The syndicalists believed in forming trade unions and convincing workers to believe in a future general strike. After 1905, the Bolsheviks were deeply divided between those who, like Lenin, claimed to be following Marxist scientific orthodoxy, and those who, like Alexander Bogdanov, believed Marxism was not a set of truths, but a set of useful myths that workers might be convinced to believe. Lenin, in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909), attacked Bogdanov’s relativism.
The Bolsheviks fought over who should control the party faction’s money and RSDWP schools for workers and revolutionaries in Paris, Bologna, and Capri. Lenin’s followers in European exile argued with Bogdanov’s followers inside Russia. Although the Bolshevik journal was called Pravda (Truth), the Bolsheviks by 1914 were a shrinking group of alienated intellectuals who could agree on little except for their old feud with the Mensheviks, who maintained better ties with factory workers.
When World War I broke out in 1914, there was no great general strike. Russian socialists were divided among defensists who patriotically supported their government at war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, and pacifists who wanted to end the war. Lenin wanted the war transformed into a revolution and civil war, then a workers’ revolution. But most Russian socialists, exiled either in Europe or Siberia, hardly affected the war effort.
In 1917 the February Revolution surprised both the government and the revolutionaries. Nicholas II abdicated. A liberal Provisional Government shared power with radical workers’ councils, known as soviets, that sprang up in the factories, farms, and army units. Returning from exile, Lenin and the Bolsheviks proclaimed war against the Provisional Government. As the unpopular great war dragged on, the Bolshevik program of workers’ revolution and land reform gained them majorities in the soviets. By October, the Bolshevik-dominated soviets easily took power in the major cities from the weakened Provisional Government.
The Bolshevik Revolution did not end the dispute between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. Bog-danov led a proletarian culture movement popular among the masses for a few years. Leon Trotsky became a popular and independent leader of the new Red Army. And Josef Stalin quietly worked to cre160
BOLSHOI THEATER
ate a single-party dictatorship that exiled or killed its enemies. By 1924 the Bolsheviks had become a party in their own right, first the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918, and then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1924. Ultimately the Bolsheviks led a massive and violent program of industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and purges that made the Soviet Union as autocratic and unpopular as its imperial predecessor. Sochor, Zenovia. (1988). Revolution and Culture: The Bog-danov-Lenin Controversy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ulam, Adam. (1965). The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia. New York: Macmillan. Williams, Robert C. (1986). The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and his Critics, 1904-1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
See also: FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; COMMUNISM; MEN-SHEVIKS; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY
Pomper, Phillip. (1990). Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia in Power. New York: Columbia University Press. Service, Robert. (2000). Lenin. A Biography. London: Macmillan.
BOLSHOI THEATER
Moscow’s Bolshoi (“grand”) Theater became a kind of national theater and showcase for Russian opera and ballet in the Soviet period. The original Bolshoi Theater opened in 1825, although historians trace the theater’s lineage through a series of private theaters operating in Moscow as early as 1776. The Bolshoi Theater stands on
