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ordered them to disperse. When they refused,
the soldiers shot at the crowd, killing about 800
demonstrators and wounding even more. A
wave of indignation swept the country and
united opposition to the czar. An unprecedented
number of factories across Russia went on strike,
students also struck, and educated society and
intellectuals of all stripes condemned the intol-
erance and cruelty of the regime.
NICHOLAS II
,
who had inherited the informal title of
batiushka
(little father) accorded by the common people
and peasants to their ruler, now became
Nikolai
krovavyi,
(Bloody Nicholas). Unnerved by the
extent and intensity of the opposition, a few
weeks later Nicholas II agreed to the creation of
an elected State
DUMA
(parliament) with an
advisory role, but these and other concessions
were deemed insufficient, and what became the
1905 Revolution took on its own dynamic.
London. Relying on a procedural vote taken at
the congress, the faction led by Vladimir
LENIN
won a majority and became known as “Bolshe-
viks,” from the Russian word for
majority,
while
the other faction became known as “Menshe-
viks,” from the term for
minority.
The divisions
within the Russian Marxist movement had been
brewing for close to a decade centered on the
nature of the revolutionary party and its organi-
zation. The Bolsheviks advocated a centralized
and disciplined party of professional revolution-
aries; the Mensheviks wanted a loosely organized
mass party. There were also important ideological
distinctions based on different interpretations of
Marxism. Led by Georgi
PLEKHANOV
, the founder
of Russian Marxism, the Mensheviks followed a
strict adherence to the tenets of Marxism, argu-
ing that before Russia could move to a period of
socialist and proletarian rule, it needed to experi-
ence capitalism with a bourgeois regime. The
Bolsheviks believed that Russia's unique experi-
ence, its incomplete capitalist development, and
its weak bourgeoisie allowed for a different path
to socialism. In his famous pamphlet
What Is to
Be Done?
(1905), Lenin advanced a theory of rev-
olution that called for an alliance of workers and
peasants to overthrow the czarist government
and establish a transitional dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry. While significant,
these differences were not always clear-cut, and
many revolutionaries, such as Leon
TROTSKY
,
moved from one faction to another, even after
1912, when Bolsheviks and Mensheviks offi-
cially became separate parties. On the eve of the
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
, the Bolsheviks were still
few, united in their opposition to Russia's con-
tinued participation in World War I. With
Lenin's return to Russia from exile in April 1917,
the Bolsheviks emerged as the most consistent
opponents of the Petrograd Soviet's policy of
“dual power,” or collaboration with the Provi-
sional Government, calling instead for an imme-
diate transfer of power to the Soviets, or councils
of worker and soldier deputies, and an end to
the war. During the course of 1917, as the Provi-
sional Government lost its initial support, the
Bolsheviks gained majorities in most of the sovi-
bogatyr
From a term that means “hero” or “warrior,” a
bogatyr
(pl.
bogatyri
) was one of a group of heroes
who appear in traditional folktales or legends
(
bylini
) that have been transmitted orally since
the era of
KIEVAN RUS
. Many of the legends about
bogatyri
are set in the time of
VLADIMIR I
, who
converted Russia to Christianity. Stories about
the
bogatyri
helped bridge the myths of pre-Chris-
tian Russia with those of the new Christian era.
In some accounts
bogatyri
were heroic champi-
ons, almost demigods, who traveled the country-
side on horseback to search out evil, as depicted
in the well-known painting
Bogatyr,
by Viktor Vas-
netsov (1898). In other accounts they are repre-
sented as holy warriors, defending Holy Russia
from invaders, especially the Mongols. One of the
best known of the
bogatyri
was
ILYA MUROMETS
,
the subject of a poem of the same name written in
1795 by Nikolai
KARAMZIN
.
Bolsheviks
Members of one of the two factions of the Marx-
ist-based Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
that took shape after the 1903 party congress in
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