Answering rhetorical questions

[redbird]

Someone at my job handed around copies of an article about Eats, Shoots and Leaves . The article includes the rhetorical question "How can you resist a book dedicated to 'the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution'?"

Well, it's a good thing the author claims to be a punctuation expert, not a copyeditor or historian, because I answered that one immediately: there were no Bolsheviks in 1905. That factional split (and wonderful example of propagandistic naming, right up there with "Moral Majority") hadn't yet happened. Socialist printers, sure. Communists, quite possibly. Not Bolsheviks.

And this on a book that's supposedly about the value of accuracy and precision.

[Crossposted to an open thread on tnh's Making Light, far enough down that I don't know if anyone will notice it.]

Comments

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Having nothing better to do than surf today, I found this reference (http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/CommunisUSSR_Origins.asp) which says that the split came up in 1903. The info surprised me, too.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

I found this interesting little tidbit: (http://mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures/rev1905.html)

Its newspaper, Iskra, founded in 1900, pushed for unity among the various factions. At the famous Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903 there was a fight for control of the newspaper and hence the main organ of propaganda and ideology. Whoever controlled the newspaper could more or less determine the ideological slant of the movement. At the 1903 Congress Lenin's group for a short time managed to get a majority in the Central Committee and on the board of directors of Iskra. They called themselves Bolsheviks, which means majority. "In this inconspicuous manner Bolshevism...slipped almost unnoticed into a hostile world."

It looks more like the strikes in Moscow and then St. Petersburg in 05 were part of the general strike and if punctuation was mentioned at all it was as a pretext, tho -- although I can understand her using it the way she does for her book.

[volund.livejournal.com]

I found another reference with the same information, right on my bookshelf, in Bertram Wolfe's Three Who Made a Revolution (an intertwined biography of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin by an American ex-Marxist turned anti-Communist).

He discusses the 1903 party congress in some detail, including when Lenin named his faction Bolshinstvo or Bolsheviki.

This, however, did start as a factional struggle at a party congress held in Brussels and London, amongst a party leadership of whom many were at this point emigres and exiles. The question might be, how long did it take for that factional disagreement to filter down to the cadres back in Russia?

So, a reference to Bolsheviks in 1905 would not be anachronistic, but in this context it may very well still reflect extreme artistic license.