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.