The Bolsheviks formed out of the 1903 disagreement between Lenin and Martov at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Tottenham Court Road, London. The disagreement focussed largely on party membership; Martov argued that anyone who accepted the goals of the party, supported it financially or physically should be considered a 'member' of the RSDLP. Lenin on the other hand, as outlined in his pamphlet What is to be Done?, argued for the creation of a small, centralised 'vanguard' of the proletarian, dedicated to revolutionary ideals not just the party goals.

This disagreement was taken to a vote and the party split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The name 'Bolshevik' simply comes from the Russia word for 'majority'/'Bolshinstvo', and 'Menshevik' meaning minority/'Menshinstvo' (although, confusingly, the Mensheviks won the vote).

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Now, what made Bolsheviks different from Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, or indeed their predecessors in the populist intelligentsia, was the usage of violence [Extract from a paper I wrote in November on "The Failure of the ‘Public Sphere’ in Late Tsarist Russia, Bolshevik Militarism and the Russian Civil War"]:

There were two sources, and two groups, that instilled this violent culture on Russian politics on the years leading up to 1917: the Populists and the Bolsheviks. The various Russian intelligentsia members including students, artists, writers, and journalists led the first of these groups. The Populist movement idealised the peasant mir and commune, seeing it as the purest form of socialism; Populists saw the rise of industrialised capitalism as the destruction of traditional rural communities. Wishing to ‘save’ and educate the peasantry on the Populists’ own attempts at political revolution against autocracy, a mass-movement to rural Russia was sparked in 1873-74. The Populist movement failed to integrate themselves with the peasantry; the peasants were suspicious and often handed their would-be teachers over to Tsarist police. Out of their failure, the Populists began to see their role as sacrificial, to serve the people in order to topple autocracy, they sought to avenge their arrested associates by turning to radical terrorism, with the group The People’s Will succeeding in assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As previously mentioned, the peasant political consciousness revolved around archaic and subsistence goals, and part of the failure of the Populists was perhaps due to the difficulty of the peasants too see themselves as a vessel of change in regards to toppling the autocracy of imperial Russia. As one British diplomat observed in 1917: “Were one to ask the average peasant in the Ukraine his nationality, he would answer that he is Greek Orthodox; if pressed to say whether he is a Great Russian, a Pole, or an Ukrainian, he would probably reply he is a peasant; and if one insisted on knowing what language he spoke, he would say that he talked ‘the local tongue’”.

Despite the Populist mass-movement, four decades later the peasantry clearly still failed to place themselves socially or politically within the scene of a wider Russia. Furthermore, out of the failure of the Populist movement in the late nineteenth century, the seeds for radical and militant Bolshevism were sown. In Richard Pipes’ Russian Marxism and Its Populist Background: The Late Nineteenth Century, the transition from dogmatic Marxism to violent Populism is charted, which had a major impact on the development of Russian Marxism. Pipes argued that Marxism, in the hands of radical Populists and notable leaders such as Adrei Zhelyabov (1851-1881), Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918) and Petr Tkachev (1844-1886), transitioned into a movement primarily of terror with the end goal of the violent seizure of national power post-autocracy. Ultimately, where political liberalisation failed, violence prevailed.

A number of these, in effect, terrorists had a profound effect on constructing Lenin’s own views of Marxism and political revolution. Lenin praised Zhelyabov, famed for devising the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, for his dedication to the cause of revolution; Zhelyabov was perhaps the first to link Populism with a national struggle for political rights, shifting the Populist aim from violence to manipulation of other political parties by forming loose coalitions. Tkachev’s influence on Leninist theory was more Jacobin in nature, in the 1870s he argued in favour of the seizure of power by a highly centralised, disciplined vanguard capable of enforcing a dictatorship and defeating the richer peasants and landholders who he believed would naturally support the capitalist status quo. Plekhanov in a sense merged these two principles and created the so-called ‘Two Stage Transition’ theory, in which alliances would be created with liberal parties to install a western-style liberal democracy before transferring power from the landholding classes and bourgeoisies to the working classes. Plekhanov’s theory was regarded as untenable to the Russian Marxists, at least in a peaceful environment, as such E.G Levit a member of the Veterans of the People’s Will in 1897 surveyed Plekhanov’s plan and wrote four lines stating how revolutionary activity should unfold in Russia:

"1. The new party will direct its main effort against absolutism.
2. The new party will constitute a new compact organization, because the enemy is too strong to be fought by individuals or groups operating in isolation.
3. Since there is among us not a single politically mature class of population, the party will recruit its members in all the classes of society (at first, mainly from among the young intelligentsia).
4. Since our revolutionary forces are not numerous, the party will have to have (as long as there is absolutism) a strictly conspiratorial character."

These theories of Russian Marxism and militancy can certainly be identified in Leninist policy. Most notably was Lenin’s pamphlet, What is to be Done? (1902), which outlined the Bolshevik party’s ability to arrest its own members if necessary, a precursor to the Terror and the creation of the VCheKa. ‘Trimming the fat’ of the Bolshevik party, so to speak, created the centralised vanguard Lenin desired; this centralised nature being one of the fundamental disputes that led to the Bolshevik/Menshevik split in 1903. Isreal Getzler discussed in his 1996 article, Lenin’s Conception of Revolution as Civil War, Lenin’s theory in regards to the fallout of the total collapse of Tsarism. In such an event, Lenin theorised a full-scale civil war between the bourgeoisies and the proletariat. Lenin theorised a further second civil war, in which the state would change hands and eliminate the revolutionary government; ultimately the proletariat would be defeated during this second war, primarily on economic grounds, left alone to battle against the liberal bourgeoisies, rich and middling peasants. In short, Lenin was prepared for civil war and his doctrine emphasised this; Bolshevism, Leninism and to extent the Soviet State, were not born out of pure Marxist theory but from a radical and violent chapter of Russian history with Lenin instilling this violent conspiratorial neo-Populist tendency on his followers: As Orlando Figes writes, “It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary, but Lenin that made Marxism revolutionary.”