Bolsheviks were the dominant political power in Russia after the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party seized control of that country’s government in 1917. The Bolsheviks (“Bolshevik” meaning “one of the majority”) were anti-feudal revolutionaries who were described in the United States as radical, anti-capitalist socialists. Under the leadership of Vladimir Leninm the Bolsheviks changed their party name to the “Russian Communist Party”  in 1918 (and later to the “Communist Party of the Soviet Union”). In the United States, charges of Bolshevism popped up after World War I. Thousands of people were arrested and hundreds were deported during the Red Scare at the height of public fears about radical subversion. Unions and strikers were accused of harboring Bolshevik sympathies. Businesses blamed worker discontent and labor disputes on Bolshevik plots and “red” Russian ideas.