The split of Social Democrat Labor Party (SDLP) of Russia gave birth to Bolsheviks. After the split of the party in 1903, the answer to the question of who would be leading the party was obvious – Vladimir Lenin. In the times to come, Bolsheviks would become the organization to lead the 1917 Russian Revolution, until which the organization was only a minority. This was also the period of World War I, which introduced huge losses to the Russian economy at the cost of the lives of hundreds of soldiers. This had brought about a great factor of demoralization in the army. The government began to be labeled as corrupt and blamed for the losses. The population saw food shortages, diminished labor force, and the congestion of the public transport. Due to these factors, there was a steep rise in the food prices, which only increased the hardships of the people and led to strikes. These factors stirred up a great unrest in both the towns and the countryside, which was only aggravated by the soldiers of the army who did not want to go to the war. Affected by the results of the war, Lenin opposed it gravely and joined Zimmerwald Movement, where he appealed to the workers all across the nation to oppose the war and to bring an end to it by starting a revolution against the government. According to Lenin, the war would only bring discredit to the government and lead to the socialist revolution. The whole period of the revolution saw different crests and troughs in the opinion of the public towards the Bolsheviks.
Public opinion is an aggregate of the views, beliefs and attitudes of the individuals, expressed by a significant proportion of the community. It can be treated as either a collection of different views, or a synthesis of all the views of society, or its particular segment. Public opinion has always been important for the governments and organizations, and continue to be so, since without the public support, no government can sustain. The oppressive or the tyrant form of the leaders would also want to know what the general pulse of the public is, in order to understand how to oppress them more effectively.
In earlier times, the most common form of the public opinion was the rebellion, followed by unpaid taxes. These were the indicators for the rulers and the governments to understand that the public support against them was eroding. During these times, secret police used to act as monitors of public opinion. They used to find out which people oppose the government and eliminate them. During the modern times, the governments have come up with various formal and informal ways of assessing public opinion.
The most common way for a democratic government to understand the opinion of the citizens is through elections. They are built into the system of a country at regular intervals and act as an important medium for the public to express what they think about the national politics. Many governments often look to the media happenings to understand the views of the public. Media is an important medium to note and observe, because of the news items they choose, and how they portray it. People may also use letters and calls to the government officials. Most of the times, they are about specific problems related to the individual, however sometimes they are also about important political issues. These are an important medium for the government to understand the views of the thousands of the voters.
Coming to the formal processes, the government can go about conducting surveys and interviews, which in turn can be face-to-face, telephonic or mail surveys. Other methods for gathering data about the views of the public include Internet interviewing and intercept interviewing. Internet interviews are usually conducted over the Internet in the form of questionnaires and the intercept interviews involve intercepting the people in public places, such as shopping malls.
Public opinion about Bolsheviks, and particularly Lenin, greatly varied during the course of time. When the Bolshevik Party was born, in spite of constituting of about 30,000 members, it failed to gain the cooperation and support of the people. It gained power in Petrograd, but even that was because of the unpopularity of the current Provisional government. Throughout 1917, the Bolshevik Party promised the Russians with peace, land, and bread. Immediately after coming to power, they abolished the private properties and distributed the land among the peasants. This is when they started to gain the popularity among the people. With the passing time, they also signed a decree to withdraw from the World War and seek a peace settlement with Germany. This brought out the Provisional Government’s inability to act on the grave issues at hand, and paved the path for Bolsheviks to take over the power in October 1917. The decrees signed by the Bolshevik government thereafter were the indicators of the awareness of the urgency of carrying out the promises they made to the people of Russia. With the strong public support that they gained by the end of the revolution and the war, they went on to establish Soviet Union in 1922.
The opinion on Bolsheviks also varied among different segments of the society. The audience that the Bolsheviks targeted was the worker class. With time, they did gain the support of the worker class by bringing the enterprises under the worker control. However, at this time, the workers were not politically united. While one group was against the Bolsheviks taking over the power, citing the loss of freedom of assembly, strike, press, and universal suffering; other groups provided them unconditional support for their anti-war stance and the willingness to negotiate on the Peace Treaty with the Germans.
Another segment of the society that supported them was of the families of the soldiers, who were forced to go for the World War. Protesting against the war and appealing to withdraw gradually won them the support of the common middle class families of Russia.
Works Cited
Steinberg, Mark D. Voices of Revolution, 1917. New Haven and London: Yale UP.
