The Bolsheviks have been the victims of more distortion, misrepresentation and outright lies than any other political movement in history.

Most people on the left see the defining features of the "Bolshevik party model" as being to do with organisational issues - the structure of the party, its rules and regulations etc.

In the eyes of its critics (and sadly, some supporters) Bolshevism means a centralised, disciplined party where members are expected to follow the line of the party leadership at all times, where dissent is not tolerated, and the party acts somewhat in the manner of a drone army.

This conception is completely wrong.

First, it is based on a total rewriting of the history of the Bolsheviks on organisational questions - the Bolsheviks were anything but the monolithic, super-centralised party that they are portrayed as.

Second, the core defining features of Bolshevism have nothing to do with narrow questions of party organisation or structure. The breakthrough that Lenin and his party made was on a series of political questions that were posed by the development of capitalism and the working class movement in Russia and internationally.

Lenin: an orthodox social-democrat

Those who argue that the essence of Bolshevism can be found in a particular form of party organisation invariably centre their analysis on the 1903 split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Bertram Wolfe summed up this view:

"In two pamphlets, and a number of articles published between 1902 and 1904, Lenin had been hammering away at his new organisation plan for a ‘party of a new type', that is, one differing fundamentally from all previous Marxian parties, whether those founded while Marx and Engels were alive, or since."

This is total rubbish. Far from advocating a party model that was radically different from the Western socialist parties, Lenin saw his task as building in Russia a party on the model of those in the West, in particular the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Lars Lih, in his excellent book Lenin Rediscovered, describes Lenin as an "Erfurtian", someone who "accepts the SPD as a model party, accepts the Erfurt Programme as an authoritative statement of the social-democratic mission, and accepts Karl Kautsky's tremendously influential commentary The Erfurt Programme as an authoritative definition of Social Democracy."

On all the organisational questions of the period Lenin saw himself as occupying the ground of the Second International. A party with an unambiguous Marxist program; centralised and disciplined; organised on a national scale with a clear division of labour; a "vanguard" party that would lead the mass of the class - Lenin saw the arguments he made for all of these things as simply a reiteration of the accepted social-democratic position.

Not that Lenin didn't take into account the differences between Russia and the West. He identified the lack of political democracy - i.e. the existence of the Tsarist regime - as the main barrier to organising a mass party in Russia along the lines of the SPD. It was precisely for that reason that Lenin set the winning of democratic freedoms as the key task of the Russian socialist movement. Far from being a conspiratorial schemer, Lenin was one of history's greatest champions of democracy.

Spurious charges over centralism

How then was the myth of Lenin the authoritarian centralist to emerge from the 1903 debates?

The main reason is the retrospective campaign waged by the ideological warriors of world capitalism to slander Lenin.

Nonetheless, their accusations can have some resonance on the left because the Mensheviks and their supporters, including two authoritative revolutionaries - Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg - attacked Lenin on the question of centralism.

The truth though, is that Lenin's position was distorted for factional reasons from the very start.

A large part of Lenin's argument at the time was to point out that he did not hold the opinions ascribed to him. Take his reply to Luxemburg's polemic:

"Rosa Luxemburg says that ‘according to [Lenin's] conception, the Central Committee has the right to organise all the local Party committees.' Actually that is not so...

"Comrade Luxemburg says that in my view ‘the Central Committee is the only active nucleus of the Party.' Actually that is not so. I have never advocated any such view..."

And on it goes. As Hal Draper commented, Lenin's defence consisted of rather mildly protesting - what are you talking about?

The real pre-war breakthrough

While Lenin's conceptions were based upon social-democratic orthodoxy on a theoretical level, there is also no doubt that in practice the period before the war saw the beginnings of a party that was in essence different from those in the West.

There have been a number of arguments put forward in this regard which are misleading. The main one is that Lenin, though in theory committed to the ideas of the Second International, pragmatically shifted in response to Russian conditions, in particular the reality of Tsarist repression.

But Lenin's approach was far from un-theorised pragmatism. As Neil Harding argues convincingly in Lenin's Political Thought, Lenin's arguments up until 1914 were based on his theoretical work, in particular the long book The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

Its key conclusion, based on a detailed study of Russian society and the different classes within it, was that Russia was ripe for revolution.

This is the key to understanding the breakthrough in Bolshevik practice. Whereas for the European Marxists revolution was a general, distant goal, in Russia the coming revolution was the focus of all political debate.

Much later Georg Lukacs was to argue that the essence of Lenin's method was that it began by recognising what Lukacs called "the actuality of revolution".

It was the "actuality" - the imminence - of the revolution, not Tsarist repression, that was most important in shaping the Bolsheviks' outlook. The divide between today's tasks and those of the future revolution that were embodied in the minimum and maximum program of the German party could not exist in a country where the rising revolutionary tide was obvious to everyone.

It is true that Lenin did not see the coming revolution as a socialist revolution. But in a sense this hardly mattered. His whole argument centred on the necessity for the working class to lead the revolution, and establish a radical republic in alliance with the peasantry. This meant the socialists had to try to lead that struggle, to fuse not only socialism and the working class in general (Kautsky agreed with that), but to fuse socialism and the working class in the revolutionary struggle.

In this way the categories and norms of orthodox Marxism began to take on new meaning. Centralism was justified on the grounds of action. The vanguard role of the party shifted from being about simply educating the class to be the means by which the whole of the working class and the oppressed more broadly could be led in revolt against the old order. The fight against opportunism and other erroneous political currents became not simply an ideological battle for purity of principle, but a struggle on the level of the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary movement.

But although the Bolsheviks developed an outlook, a revolutionary ethos, much different from that existing in the Western parties, there was no break on the level of theory.

The split with the Mensheviks was justified almost wholly in terms of the Kautskyite tradition. Menshevism, according to the Bolsheviks, was not a reformist current in the workers' movement - it reflected an intellectual or petty-bourgeois outlook. In that sense the various splits and schisms could be justified entirely on the orthodox grounds of establishing a single genuine workers' party.

The war was to change all of this.

Socialist revolution and the break with reformism

Until August 1914, Lenin saw himself, and in a very real sense was, simply a part of the left wing of the social-democratic movement.

From the outbreak of the war, he set himself the task of building a new, revolutionary movement based on a program of unrelenting struggle against the Social Democratic parties of the Second International, and any who advocated compromise with them.

Lenin's slogan was to "turn the war between countries into a civil war between classes".

This was grounded in two key theoretical breakthroughs.

The first was Lenin's recognition that the war was the outgrowth of a new phase of capitalism - imperialism. In this new epoch the road of peaceful development, Lenin argued, was cut off. The only alternative to war was socialist revolution.

Every political issue - war and peace, the national question, the class struggle, the attitude to the state, social classes and political parties - had to be seen in the context of one question: what did it mean for the world revolution?

The second element of Lenin's new outlook, his uncompromising attitude to the reformists, was based on his recognition that reformism was not simply an ideological deviation from Marxism, but a bourgeois ideology that had social roots in the workers' movement.

For this reason the communists had to not only break with the reformists decisively, they had to fight to defeat them politically - to win the mass of workers away from their influence - if the revolution was to succeed.

This political orientation, rather than any particular question of party structure or organisation, constitutes the essence of mature Bolshevism.

The Comintern: generalising the Bolshevik experience

In the years after the war, the Bolsheviks undertook great efforts to help build Communist Parties that could win the working class away from reformism in every country.

In the course of this, an attempt was made to codify the core elements of the Bolshevik experience and generalise it internationally.

The content of the resolutions of the Communist International (Comintern) in the pre-Stalin period are overwhelmingly concerned with implementing the political strategy outlined above.

But it is also true that in the Comintern period there was a much greater emphasis on questions of organisational form. Terms like "iron discipline" and "the strictest centralism" are, at various points, thrown around like confetti.

Although such an approach was paraded as the means by which the Communist Parties could emulate the Russian experience it had little to do with the actual history of Bolshevism before or during 1917.

In all this history there is very little talk about "iron discipline". In fact there is no doubt the reformist parties were much more centralised and disciplined than the Bolsheviks.

In the pre-war struggle with the Mensheviks, Lenin repeatedly appealed to the right of minorities to publically criticise the majority, to put out their own publications and so on.

It is reasonable to argue that in the pre-war period Lenin's strategy was dictated by the fact that he was fighting the Mensheviks, and that once a purely revolutionary party had been established, centralism and discipline should prevail. But in reality this did not happen.

The most famous example is the fight launched by Lenin against the Central Committee of the party when he returned to Russia in April 1917, when he rallied almost the whole mass base of the party against the central leadership in order to overturn their policy of accommodation to the provisional government.

It was not some prerogative of Lenin's to behave in this way. As is inevitable in any genuinely revolutionary workers' party the Bolsheviks were a huge seething democracy, characterised by fierce argument and disagreement at almost every turn.

The change in tone in the Comintern years was due to a number of factors.

First, the Communist International was determined not to be like the Second, in which the autonomy of the individual sections had been the "autonomy" to betray their internationalist principles and side with their own bourgeoisie in the war.

Second, in the years after the revolution, millions of radical workers began to look towards the Comintern. But while their party leaders were prepared to pay lip service to the Comintern and the Russian revolution, many had not broken in practice with reformism, and had no intention of doing so.

In both of these cases discipline was directed not at party members, but at the untrustworthy leaders of the newly formed Communist parties.

Such a motivation is a far cry from what became the norm under Stalin, or even earlier, during Zinoviev's so-called "Bolshevisation" of the Comintern in the mid-1920s, when "party discipline" became simply the obedience of the party members to the all-knowing leaders - the precise opposite of what it had meant in the Comintern's revolutionary years.

The third reason for the change in tone was the political situation. It is hard to give a sense of the atmosphere that gripped the Second Comintern Congress in 1920. To get to the Congress, delegates had had to find their way across a war-torn continent, dodging barricades and strikes. It was generally agreed that across Europe the class struggle was morphing into open armed conflict. The oft-cited phrase that summed up the sentiment of delegates was: "the weapon of criticism is everywhere being replaced by the criticism of weapons".

Another factor was the impact of the transformation of the Russian party during the Civil War.

The final reason for the emphasis on organisational measures was the political weakness of the new Communist parties. In his pamphlet Left-Wing Communism Lenin argued that discipline could only be achieved in a party that had proven the correctness of its arguments in the struggle, where the leadership had won the authority to lead politically:

"Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning."

The problem was that such conditions could not be realised overnight. The Communist parties, newly emerged from the disastrous routing of the socialist movement during the war, were incapable of exercising such political discipline.

All of this understandably fostered a tendency to try to overcome by organisational means what the communists lacked politically.

But to leave it at this would be one-sided. The truth is the Comintern in its early years was one of the most democratic institutions the world has ever seen. Both inside and outside sessions, it was consumed by vigorous and open debate.

Although at times (inevitably) its clashes took on a somewhat personal tone, they were overwhelmingly fiercely political in their nature, as the various forces of the revolutionary movements of the world thrashed out their differences, convinced - and not without justification - that the fate of the whole of humanity rested on the outcome of their deliberations.

This is the real history of Bolshevism. A chaotic, insurgent, revolutionary movement. A movement infused with a democratic spirit, fuelled by a determination to defeat the reformist forces that had so betrayed the working class, and organised to lead a struggle to crush the power of the exploitative ruling minority.