Bolshevik support base

[The Vegan Marxist]

What was the size of the Bolshevik's support base during the October revolution?

[∞]

Not large for a revolution, quite large for a coup.

[Zanthorus]

What was the size of the Bolshevik's support base during the October revolution?

This is Evan Mawdsley's run-down of the basis and size of Bolshevik support through an examination of the elections to the All-Russia Constituent Assembly (From 'The Russsian Civil War'):


Socialism was deeper red in the towns than in the electorate as a whole. The extreme left, the Bolsheviks, won 36% of the votes, making them the largest party. In Petrogad the Bolsheviks took 45 percent, in Moscow 50 percent. The urban Bolshevik votes accounted for only about 1.4 million of the 40 million votes cast, but because power was based on the towns they represented crucial nuggets of strength...

The vast Russian armed forces were the third element of mass up-heaval... The Constituent Assembly elections showed the soldiers to have overwhelmingly supported the Russian socialist parties: 82 percent voted for the SRs or the Bolsheviks... The Bolsheviks.. took 41 percent in the army... the Bolsheviks did even better among troops near the centre of political power. In the Northern and Western Army Groups their vote was over 60 percent (And the SR vote under 30 percent) and they did extremely well in the crucial rear garrisons: 60 percent in Petrograd (12 percent for the SRs) and 80 percent in Moscow (6 percent SR).

He never says what the total Bolshevik vote was, strangely enough, but he does say that 27 percent of the total vote went to Marxists, nearly all of which was accounted for by the Bolsheviks. He doesn't give any rundown of the Bolshevik results in the Soviets, although they did have the majority of delegates at the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

[thesadmafioso]

During the time of the actual revolution it was growing at an incredible rate and becoming very prevalent in urban centers due to the strong support which the group received from the industrial proletariat , but it was still rather small in throughout the entire Russian Empire. As about 70% of Russia's population was composed of the peasantry at this time in history, a slower rise to prominence for the Bolshevik Party was only to be expected though. This was seen in the post revolution results of the constituency assembly, which failed to net the Bolsheviks an outright majority. Once more though, due to the massive fluctuation in political tendencies during this time, the possibility of these results differing if said elections were held even a month later should be seriously noted.

[Lyev]

As regards the actual size of the party, a user on here, "ComradeOm", was pretty well-read on the October revolution and the civil war etc. He wrote an essay which contains this passage:
There is little doubt that in 1917 the Bolsheviks were a fringe party in Russian politics but they were not an insignificant one. By 1914 their Petrograd organisation had built up sizeable levels of support amongst the proletariat but this was mostly destroyed with the outbreak of war. The mass conscription of experienced workers and intensified harassment from Tsarist police decimated the party's structures leaving no more than 2,000 members in the capital, with barely 10,000 in the Empire as a whole, by the time of the February Revolution. Yet in a matter of months the party would see an explosion in its membership (80-100k in April and over 350k by the October Revolution), capture a majority of the newly emerging soviets, and emerge as the unquestioned party of the Russian proletariat.(emphasis mine, by the way)
Unfortunately, I don't think he posts much, if at all, anymore

[Sir Comradical]

Not large for a revolution, quite large for a coup.

Don't hate the player hate the game.

[Bronco]

They were becoming increasingly popular and had a large support base in the cities but they weren't looked on too favourably by the peasants, most of whom would have supported the Social Revolutionaries. Before 1917 it had also generally been the Mensheviks that were the more popular of the two, historians are pretty divided over whether it was a coup or a popular rising but even if there wasnt overwhelming support for the Bolsheviks themselves there certainly was for revolutionary change.