Old Bolshevik
Old Bolshevik (Russian: ста́рый большеви́к, stary bolshevik), also Old Bolshevik Guard or Old Party Guard, became an unofficial designation for those who were members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Many of the Old Guard were either tried and executed by the NKVD during Stalin era purges or died under suspicious circumstances.
Vladimir Lenin expressed an opinion that what one could call the "old party guard", a "thinnest layer", had a "huge, unshared prestige". [1]
According to a 1972 Soviet book by D.A. Chygayev, in 1922 there were 44,148 Old Bolsheviks.[2] Vadim Rogovin cites the statistics published by the 13th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), that in 1924, of 600,000 Party members, 0.6% joined before 1905, 2% joined in 1906-1916 and <9% joined in 1917. [3]
Joseph Stalin removed many of the Old Bolsheviks from power during the Great Purges of the 1930s. (The most prominent survivors in the Communist Party were Lazar Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Stalin himself.) Some were executed for treason; some were sent to labor camps (the Gulag); and a few, such as Alexandra Kollontai, went abroad as ambassadors, preventing them from participating in the central government. Many Communist opponents of Stalin, most notably the Trotskyists, cite this fact in support of their argument that Stalin betrayed the aims of the revolution: they believed in the World Revolution, while Stalin and his supporters believed in Socialism in One Country.
Various things in the Soviet Union, such as a publishing house, several steamships, motorboats, kolkhozes and settlements, gained the name Old Bolshevik.[4][5][6]
Partial listing
Significant Old Bolsheviks included:
- Mikhail Borodin
- Nikolai Bukharin
- Felix Dzerzhinsky
- Ilya Ehrenburg
- Lazar Kaganovich
- Mikhail Kalinin
- Lev Kamenev
- Sergey Kirov
- Alexandra Kollontai
- Stanislav Kosior
- Nadezhda Krupskaya
- Vladimir Lenin
- Vladimir Mayakovsky
- Anastas Mikoyan
- Vyacheslav Molotov
- Grigory Ordzhonikidze
- Pavel Postyshev
- Georgy Pyatakov
- Karl Radek
- Alexey Rykov
- Fyodor Sergeyev
- Joseph Stalin
- Elena Stasova
- Yakov Sverdlov
- Semeno Ter-Petrosian
- Leon Trotsky (joined in July 1917)
- Kliment Voroshilov
- Genrikh Yagoda
- Yakov Yurovsky
- Andrei Zhdanov
- Grigory Zinoviev
See also
References
- ↑ «Если не закрывать себе глаза на действительность, то надо признать, что в настоящее время пролетарская политика партии определяется не ее составом, а громадным, безраздельным авторитетом того тончайшего слоя, который можно назвать старой партийной гвардией. Достаточно небольшой внутренней борьбы в этом слое, и авторитет его будет если не подорван, то во всяком случае ослаблен настолько, что решение будет уже зависеть не от него», V.Lenin, March 26, 1922
- ↑ "Shameless Classic", Mark Deutsch, Moskovsky Komsomolets, 2003, citing Д.А.Чугаев, "Коммунистическая партия - организатор СССР".
- ↑ Vadim Rogovin, Was There An Alternative?
- ↑ Подвиг экипажа парохода “Старый Большевик” Victory of crew of "Stari Bolshevik" (in Russian) (Article about one of 5 steamships called "Old Bolshevik" or "Stari Bolshevik)
- ↑ Печать в Москве в 1917 году : отражение борьбы партий в печати (in Russian). Example of book edited by "Stari Bolshevik" or "Old Bolshevik"
- ↑ Robert C. Tucker. "Letter of an Old Bolshevik". Slavic Review, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 782-785 (in english)