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

[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.