Olga Sergeyevna
By kapetanmichalis A socialist revolutionary in St. Petersburg, 1913. And perhaps your comrade.
"The labor movement, which had been suppressed since the 1905 uprising, began to regain momentum. Bolsheviks seized control of all major labor unions in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and took all 6 seats allocated to the workers’ curiae in the Fourth Duma elections. Now Bolsheviks' main task is to demonstrate that their political stance resonates more strongly with Russia's 'conscious' proletariat than that of Menshevik-liquidators."
### Bolsheviks
- The basic unit of the party is the city committee. The St. Petersburg and Moscow city committees are well-organized bodies controlling hundreds of revolutionaries, but most committees have collapsed or remain unstable due to government repression.
- City committees are run by an organizational secretary (establishes policies and supervises all operations), a propaganda secretary (manages publications and propaganda agents), and a technical secretary (supervises arranging meeting places, hiding revolutionaries on the run, collecting and disbursing money, maintaining communications with other party organizations in Russia and abroad, and distributing illegal literature). Due to the nature of socialists, who value knowledge and ideology, the technical secretary is implicitly regarded as having a lower status than other leaders. Most female leaders are technical secretaries.
- The role of exiled leaders is to study Marxism, develop strategy and tactics, maintain networks with Russian city committees. While underground activists in the city committees respect the ideological leadership of the exiled leaders, they have to reasonably adjust the directives from leaders who is unfamiliar with the realities inside Russia.
- Because large groups are vulnerable to infiltration by Okhrana spies and provocateurs, the Bolsheviks are mainly dispersed into cells of trusted friends. Since the Okhrana's strategy is to make underground organizations collapse from within by making them suspect each other, investigators generally do not physically abuse suspects or prisoners.
- Before the 1917 Revolutions, most Bolsheviks, with the exception of Lenin, were not so much a band of ruthless conspirators united by the goal of seizing power, but rather a fraternal cult of intellectuals who pursue 'tverdost'. While they adhered to Lenin's insistence that the party must lead the workers, they lacked specific ideas on how to achieve this and were neither more organized nor more authoritarian than Mensheviks.
## Reference
- Semyon Kanatchikov, 'A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semyon Ivanovich Kanatchikov'
- Barbara Clements, 'Bolshevik Women'
- Stephen Kotkin, 'Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878-1928'
## Recommended AI Model
- 'Claude 3.5 Sonnet' or better