Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) that split with the Mensheviks at the Second Party Congress in 1903, where Lenin argued for a smaller party of professional revolutionaries. Their name came from the Russian word for majority, as Lenin's faction won the votes on most important issues. The faction became a separate party in 1912, seized power in the October Revolution of 1917 and suppressed opposition during the Russian Civil War; after 1921 it was the sole legal party. Renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918, it became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1952.