Word: leninism
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...nine were promptly arrested. The fact that the heirs of this absurd little group actually did overthrow the Russian government not 22 years later was due largely to the malign genius of one man who wasn't even present at the Minsk meeting: Vladimir Ulyanov, who called himself Lenin (also at various times Meyer, Richter and Jordanov...
...highly cultured schoolteacher, Lenin was expelled from school for taking part in a student protest. While idling at home, he discovered the works of Karl Marx, which prophesied the inevitable collapse of capitalism and its empires. He did finally get a law degree, but his fascination with Marxism led him to Switzerland, to an encounter with the exiled Georgi Plekhanov, the eminence grise of Russian Marxism; then to meetings with other radicals in Paris and Berlin; then, on his return home, to arrest, trial, jail and exile in Siberia. So Lenin was far away when the Social Democratic Party...
...tiny party immediately divided. Lenin was determined that it should remain small, highly disciplined and "as conspiratorial as possible." It must be the "vanguard of the 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...
This split in revolutionary strategies lasted for decades, and though the Bolsheviks claimed a majority, they were often outvoted within the party. Plekhanov tended to side with the Mensheviks, and so did an obstreperously brilliant newcomer named Lev Bronstein, who signed his fiery pamphlets with the name Trotsky. Lenin fought ruthlessly for control. He denounced his opponents as not Social Democrats but "Social Chauvinists," as "puerile," as "windbags"; after he lost a vote, he would accuse the winners of spiritless "parliamentarianism." When the Russian workers rose up in the largely spontaneous revolt of 1905, it was Trotsky, still only...
...World War I, which the exiled Lenin fervently opposed, that finally brought him to the threshold of victory. Battered by German triumphs, disheartened by bread riots and other signs of popular hostility, Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917 and handed over power to a provisional government headed by the conservative Prince Lvov. Lenin passionately argued that the time for revolution...