Accession Number: 2022.02.13.12

Historical background:

The Bolshevik radical communist party within the Russian Social Democratic Labour party emerged during the 1903 Party Congress following the split with the more moderate Mensheviks. After a period of intermittent collaboration and schism with the latter, the Bolshevik Party was formally constituted in 1912.

In October 1917, the Bolshevik Party won a majority in the revolutionary workers’ councils (soviets) which had been formed throughout Russia following the February Revolution. It subsequently organized the October Revolution, which overthrew the Provisional Government, replacing the Provisional Government with a state power under the control of the soviets, led by the Bolsheviks along with other left-wing socialists.

Bolshevism (derived from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Leninist and later Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

Italy initially did not believe in the same eugenics ideas as Nazi Germany. By 1938 Mussolini began to support racist policies like the “Manifesto of Race”. Mussolini also declared that there was no Jewish question or antisemitism in Italy. In the beginning of World War II Italy was seen as a safe haven for Jews. However as soon as 1934 Jews and Bolshevist were being removed from state organizations and institutions.