Few words in 20th century history have been as complicated as ‘Bolshevik.’ The Bolsheviks were a splinter group of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and became a formal party in 1912. They were avowed Marxists and revolutionaries who spearheaded the Russian Revolution in 1917, toppling the Tsar and giving rise to the Soviet Union. They would later rename themselves as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, although the Bolshevik nickname still stuck. For decades, the Bolsheviks ruled one of the most powerful countries on earth, endured a World War, and became locked in a decades-long ideological stand-off with the Capitalist world.

The Bolsheviks fell in 1991, and the USSR along with them, but in the years since, the legacy of their rule has been increasingly scrutinized. How much did the rosy propaganda of the USSR align with reality? What truths were revealed when the archives were opened? What diabolical things did the Bolsheviks do during the reign?

Today, we explore the dark deeds of the ruling party of the Soviet Union. If you enjoy videos like this and want to see more, click that like button and don’t forget to subscribe.

Origins
From the outset, the Bolsheviks were possessed by ideology. They preached a form of revolutionary Marxism that scorned private property and land ownership. They detested capitalism, monarchism, nationalism, and religion as tools of powerful groups to control the masses and instead believed that all of these things should be overthrown and replaced with a system of collective ownership for the benefit of the workers. The ideal Bolshevik future was one where everyone was equal in wealth and legal status, living in a world free from poverty, war, and oppression. It was an inspiring vision that had long appealed to many and continues to inspire people today. Advanced by articulate and intelligent thinkers, most notably Vladimir Lenin, Soviet-style Marxism gained traction in the early years of the 20th century.

However noble its goals may have been, even in these early years, the Bolsheviks showed that they were perfectly willing to sacrifice human lives on the altar of their ideology. For example, one of the ways that the Bolsheviks raised money in the 1900s was through robbery. This robbery often harmed the very people the Bolsheviks claimed to be protecting. In June 1907, in the Georgian city of Tiflis, a group of Bolsheviks ambushed a shipment of cash in the town’s Erivansky Square with firearms and explosives. In the ensuing violence, around 40 people were killed, many of them civilians. The robbery caused mass outrage against the Bolsheviks and many of the Bolsheviks leaders involved in the robbery, most notably Lenin and Stalin, later attempted to cover up their associations with the event. In the grand scheme of history, 40 deaths would be a mere drop in the ocean of what the Bolshevik would go on to do, but it was a chilling forewarning of what was to come.

By 1917, the memory of the robbery had faded. The Bolsheviks had become a potent force for Marxist revolution amidst a Russia locked in the grueling First World War. It was the Bolsheviks that lit the revolutionary spark that burned down the Tsarist regime in 1917 and eventually inaugurated the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). It was the first socialist state in history and it would be christened in blood. In July 1918, the deposed Tsar Nicholas II along with his family, including his 13 year old son, were executed by Bolshevik forces in an act that remains deeply controversial to this day. The Russian Civil War erupted as countless factions sought to oppose the new regime

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