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The Bolsheviks

Index to the biographies and writings of members of the
Party that made the October 1917 Revolution in Russia.

See Soviet History
Archive.

See The Bolshevik
Party in the M.I.A. Encyclopedia.

The Central Committee

There were 21 members and 10 candidate members of the
Central Committee at the time of the Revolution in 1917, including Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Josef Stalin, Grigory
Sokolnikov, Andrey
Bubnov (the seven members of the first Political Bureau), Alexandre
Kollontai, Nicholai Bukharin, Yakov
Sverdlov, V P Nogin, Alexei Rykov,
Artem
Sergeyev, Y.
Miliutin, Felix
Dzerzhinsky, Leonid
Petrovich Serebryakov, the Latvians Ivars Smilga
and Berzin, Nikolai
Krestinsky, M K
Muranov, Stepan
Shaumian and Moisei
Uritsky and Vladimir
Antonov-Ovseyenko who both sided with the Mensheviks in 1903 but, like
Trotsky, joined the Bolsheviks before the Revolution. Elena
Stasova was a candidate member and Secretary to the Central Committee. George Lomov
(Oppokov), Adolf
Joffe, Alexey
S Kiselev, Prokopius
Dzhaparidze, and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, Yakovleva
were candidate members of the C.C..

See Introduction
to the Minutes of the Bolshevik CC in 1917 by Tony CLiff.

Other leading members of the Bolshevik Party, many more
well-known than some of the Central Committee members, whose writings are
archived on the M.I.A. include: Christian Rakovsky, Karl Radek, Nadezhada
Krupskaya (Lenin's wife), Anatoly Lunacharsky, David Riazanov, Natalia Sedova.
Other well-known Bolsheviks include Mikhail
Kalinin, Vyacheslav
Molotov, Yuri
Pyatikov, the trade unionist Mikhail
Tomsky and A.G.
Schliapnikov a member with Kollontai of the Workers' Opposition in 1922,
the “Old Bolsheviks” Maxim
Litvinov, Mikhail
Lashevich, Gregory
Ordzhonikidze and the science fiction writer Alexandr Bogdanov, also
famous for his 1908 dispute with Lenin over philosophy. Inessa
Armand (often remembered for her affair with Lenin), Ivan
Smirnov, Sergei Kirov
(whose assassination was a trigger for the first of the notorious Moscow
Trials), and Nikolai
Krylenko. Mikhail
Frunze was one of those who joined the Bolsheviks before the Revolution,
but who had supported the Mensheviks in 1903, and a leader in the Red Army,
while the great Red Army General Mikhail
Tukhachesky was one of millions who joined the Bolsheviks after the
Revolution.

See Spartacus
Schoolnet for more Bolshevik biographies and Kronos, in Russian, but very
comprehensive, and this set of
portraits of the Central Committee members made in 1938

According to Archontology
entry for the Bolsheviks, 1917-1919, the Central Committee was as follows:

August 1917 - 5 March
1918: Artyom (Sergeyev), Berzin, Bubnov, Bukharin, Dzerzhinsky, Zinovyev,
Kamenev, Kollontay, Krestinsky, Lenin, Milyutin, Muranov, Smilga, Sokolnikov,
Stalin, Trotsky, Uritsky and Shaumyan; candidate members: Dzhaparidze, Ioffe,
Kiselyov, Lomov (Oppokov), Preobrazhensky, Skrypnik, Stasova, Yakovleva.

8 March 1918 - 17 March
1919: Artyom, Bukharin, Vladimirsky, Dzerzhinsky, Zinovyev, Krestinsky,
Lashevich, Lenin, Sverdlov, Smilga, Sokolnikov, Stalin, Stasova, Trotsky,
Shmidt; candidate members: Berzin, Ioffe, Kiselyov, Lomov (Oppokov),
Petrovsky, Stuchka, Uritsky, Shlyapnikov.

Links to biographies and archives of the Bolsheviks

V I Lenin [Archive, biography]
was the main theoretician and practical leader of the Bolsheviks, leading a
break from the Mensheviks
at the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903.
Returning from exile in April 1917, it was Lenin who called for an
insurrection in 1917 (See his April
Theses) and led the Party to power. A stroke incapacitated Lenin in March
1923, and he finally died on January 21 1924. (See Lenin's
Testament) only shortly after the end of the Wars
of Intervention.

See Memories
of an old comrade by Christian Rakovsky.

Leon Trotsky [Archive, biography]
did not join the Mensheviks or Bolsheviks until returning to Petrograd in 1917
and becoming convinced that only the Bolsheviks could make the Revolution and
agreeing with Lenin's call for an insurrection. Trotksy led the Military
Revolutionary Committee which organised the insurrection and went on to build
and lead the Red Army. After Stalin seized the leadership of the Party, he
formed the Left
Opposition, but was deported and in 1940, assassinated. His History
of the Russian Revolution and Revolution
Betrayed are important analyses of the Russian Revolution.

Nadezhada
Krupskaya [Archive, biography]
was a longstanding Bolshevik and Lenin's wife. Krupskaya worked in education
after the revolution. After Lenin's death she carried a great deal of prestige
but was unable to prevent Stalin's triumph and was isolated.

Alexandra Kollontai [Archive, biography]
was the most prominent female member of the Bolshevik Party, a leader of the
left-wing Workers
Opposition after the Revolution, she championed the rights of women within
the Soviet Union and raised feminist issues which went way beyond her times.
Eventually she was posted as a diplomat by Stalin, where she was unable to
play an active role in the party, but lived longer than any of her comrades as
a result.

Grigory
Zinoviev [Archive, biography]
was one of the most prominent Old Bolsheviks, who took on the role of leading
the Communist
International when it was founded in 1918. Like many others, Zinoviev
wavered in the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, but was eventually
executed after the first of the Moscow
Trials.

Lev Kamenev [Archive, biography]
was an Old Bolshevik, an old friend of Lenin's from the days before the
founding of the R.S.D.L.P.. Kamenev was closely associated with Zinoviev and
was eventually shot on Stalin's orders in 1936.

Nickolai
Bukharin [Archive, biography]
- one of the theoreticians of the Party and a gifted agitator. Although
initially close to Trotsky, after the Revolution, Bukharin was on the right of
the Party favouring more cautious programs of socialisation, and “market
socialism”. He was shot in 1938.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky [biography]
a Central Committee member mostly remembered for the ABC
of Communism, which he wrote jointly with Bukharin. Shot in 1937.

Karl
Radek [Archive, biography]
was a leading member of the Bolsheviks since 1901 and played an active role in
the movement against World War I in Germany and Poland. Radek was also
involved in the work of the Communist
International. Later a member of the Left Opposition he died in
prison.

Natalia Sedova [Archive,
biography],
Trotsky's wife who accompanied him into exile.

David
Riazanov [Archive,
including biography]
joined the Bolsheviks only in 1917 but is most famous for having led the
project in which the new Soviet state collected and published in large
numbers, all the writings of Marx and Engels. Without Riazanov's work there
would be no M.I.A. and the basic writings of Marx and Engels may have been
lost forever. He died in exile in Siberia in 1938.

Anatoly
Lunacharsky [Archive, biography]
- an intellectual and an Old Bolshevik who was one of the leading agitators in
Petrograd at the time of the Revolution. Lunacharsky was the first Commissar
for Education after the Revolution. He is most remembered however for his
series of biographical
profiles on the leaders of the Russian Revolution. Posted as ambassador to
Spain but died in 1933.

Christian Rakovsky [Archive, biography]
See Gus Fagan's biography of
Rakovsky. Rakovsky was a Bulgarian, but joined the Bolsheviks when he was
released from prison by Russian troops in 1917. Rakovsky was a leader of the
communists in the Balkans since the 1890s, who and later became a close
associate of Leon Trotsky. Disappeared in prison in 1938. See Rakovsky's autobiography

Josef Stalin [Archive,
biography].
A Georgian who joined the Bolsheviks after the split with the Mensheviks in
1903. In 1912, Stalin was appointed editor of the Bolshevik paper Pravda.
Stalin played little role in the Revolution, at first sceptical of the
prospects of insurrection, but followed Lenin in favour of insurrection, and
during the Civil War his undisciplined experiments in irregular warfare
brought him close to court marshall. As General Secretary of the Party, he
became very powerful after the end of the Civil War and became a spokesperson
for “socialism
in one country”. He isolated Lenin during his last days and eventually
gained the ascendancy in the Party after the international setbacks of 1923.
During the Moscow Trials, he systematically eliminated all the Old Bolsheviks
and instituted personal rule over the Party. After having executed all the
experienced military cadre of the Red Army and making a Pact with Hitler in
1940, he brought the Soviet Union close to defeat, but emerged after World War
Two more powerful than ever. He was denounced by Nikita
Khrushchev only after his death in 1953.

Biographies

Lenin Biography
Archive.

Trotsky Biography
Archive.

Anatoly Lunacharsky's Revolutionary
Silhouettes

Lenin on the Nature and History of the Bolshevik Party

From “Left-Wing Communism”, An infantile
Disorder:
The
international significance of the Russian Revolution
An
essential condition of the Bolsheviks’ success
The
principal stages in the history of Bolshevism
The
struggle against which enemies within the working-class movement helped
Bolshevism develop, gain strength, and become steeled.

Histories of the Revolution and the Bolshevik Party

Zinoviev's History
of the Bolshevik Party

Trotsky's History
of the Russian Revolution and his autobiography: My
Life

Eye-witness accounts of the Revolution

John Reed's Ten
Days that Shook the World, plus
Notes
on Parties and Organisations in Russia in 1917.

Cecilia Bobrovskaya's Twenty
Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-and-File Bolshevik

Louise Bryant's Mirrors
of Moscow has pen-portraits of a number of the Bolsheviks in 1923, plus Six Red
Months in Russia: An Observers Account of Russia Before and During the
Proletarian Dictatorship.

Larissa Reissner's Svyazhsk,
1918
Arhur Ransome's The
Crisis in Russia, 1920
Victor Serge's Memoirs March
1919 and 1922
Anna
Louise Strong's The
First Time in History, 1923 and
Children
of the Revolution, 1925

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Archives:
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archives)

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Blunden | Subject Archive