Word: bolshevik
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...working class" but no more than a vanguard. Lenin's more open-minded opponents wanted to take in any and all supporters, find partners and make coalitions. Lenin, as usual, insisted on getting his way, and he got it. With their majority, the Leninists took the name of Bolshevik, after bolshoi, big. The smaller group was called Mensheviks (minority...
When rioting broke out in July, Prince Lvov banned the Bolsheviks (who grew fourfold, to hundreds of thousands, in 1917), sent Lenin into hiding and % arrested Trotsky (newly arrived from New York City and newly allied with Lenin). Lvov then resigned in favor of his War Minister, Alexander Kerensky, who called in troops to maintain order in the capital and shut down Bolshevik newspapers. Trotsky, out of jail again, mobilized Red Guards to defend the Petrograd soviet, which he now headed. The government troops would not fight. Lenin called for an armed uprising. Almost without opposition, the Bolsheviks seized government...
...next day, Nov. 8, Lenin appeared before the Congress of Soviets, rejected all talk of a socialist coalition government and insisted on an all- Bolshevik Cabinet. He became Premier, with Trotsky as Foreign Minister. This was not because the Bolsheviks were the biggest or most popular party. In elections for a constituent assembly, they won only 25% of the votes, in contrast to about 62% for various moderate socialist groups, notably the peasant-backed Socialist Revolutionaries, and 13% for various bourgeois parties. Dismissing that as a "formal, juridical" matter, Lenin simply disbanded the constituent assembly after one meeting...
...nation was difficult. Although Trotsky made peace with the Germans in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Berlin's price was the separation from Russia of Poland, the Baltic states and the Ukraine. British and French troops landed in Murmansk to keep Russian supplies out of German hands. Various anti-Bolshevik "White" armies sprang up in the south and in Siberia. Japanese and American troops landed in Vladivostok...
...Caucasus the roots of the violence reach back centuries, to the time when the Ottoman Empire conquered the area. In 1920 Armenia, after a brief period of independence following the Bolshevik Revolution, sought protection from its Muslim neighbors and chose to become a Soviet republic...