Old Bolshevik (Russian: ста́рый большеви́к, stary bolshevik), also Old Bolshevik Guard or Old Party Guard, was an unofficial designation for those who were members of the Bolshevik party before the Russian Revolution of 1917, many of whom were either tried and executed by the NKVD during Stalin era purges or died under suspicious circumstances.
In 1922 there were 44,148 Old Bolsheviks. Vladimir Lenin expressed an opinion that the "old party guard", a "thinnest layer" has a "huge, unshared prestige."
Joseph Stalin removed many of the Old Bolsheviks from power during the Great Purges of the 1930s. The most prominent survivors in the Communist Party were Lazar Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, and Anastas Mikoyan. Some were executed for treason; some were sent to labor camps (the Gulag); and a few, such as Alexandra Kollontai were sent abroad as ambassadors, preventing them from participating in the central government. Many Communist opponents of Stalin, most notably the Trotskyists, cite this fact in support of their argument that Stalin betrayed the aims of the revolution: they believed in the World Revolution, while Stalin and his supporters believed in Socialism in One Country.
Various things in the Soviet Union, such as a publishing house, several steamships, motorboats, kolkhozes and settlements, were given the name Old Bolshevik. The first prominent Old Bolshevik who had died was in 1919 Yakov Sverdlov, the last one was in 1991 Lazar Kaganovich who had also reached the oldest age.
Significant Old Bolsheviks included:
- Leon Trotsky
- Elena Stasova
- Grigory Zinoviev
- Lev Kamenev
- Lazar Kaganovich
- Andrei Zhdanov
- Vyacheslav Molotov
- Kliment Voroshilov
- Nikolai Bukharin
- Yakov Sverdlov
- Felix Dzerzhinsky
- Genrikh Yagoda
- Alexey Rykov
- Mikhail Kalinin
- Georgy Pyatakov
- Anastas Mikoyan
- Mikhail Borodin
- Fyodor Sergeyev
- Nadezhda Krupskaya
- Vladimir Mayakovsky
- Grigory Ordzhonikidze
- Karl Radek
- Pavel Postyshev
- Stanislav Kosior
- Alexandra Kollontai
- Ilya Ehrenburg
- Sergey Kirov