Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks were the radical Marxist faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, that split from the party's Menshevik wing in 1903 over questions of party organization and revolutionary strategy. In November 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, dissolved the Constituent Assembly the following year, and under Lenin and then Joseph Stalin built a one party state that suppressed rival socialist and liberal parties, nationalized industry and land, and used the Cheka secret police and later organs of state terror against real and perceived opponents, including the mass repressions of the 1930s. The party was renamed the All Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1925 and, as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, governed the USSR until its dissolution in 1991.