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Mensheviks

This article is about the Mensheviks as a faction inside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. For the history of the Menshevik movement as an independent political party after 1912, see Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Mensheviks).

Mensheviks
меньшевики́
Formation1903
Dissolved1921
Key people
Parent organization
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
Formerly called
"softs"

The Mensheviks[1][2][a] were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903. The Mensheviks were led by Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod.[3][4][5][6][7]

The initial point of disagreement was the Mensheviks' support for a broad party membership, as opposed to the Bolsheviks' support for a smaller party of professional revolutionaries. However, the meaning of the names are switched: больше meaning "majority" or "more" and меньше meaning "minority" or "less".

The Bolsheviks gained a majority on the Central Committee in 1903, though the power of the two factions fluctuated in the following years. Mensheviks came to be associated with the position that a bourgeois-democratic revolution and period of capitalism would need to occur before the conditions for a socialist revolution emerged.

In 1912, the RSDLP formally split into Bolshevik and Menshevik parties. The Mensheviks further split over World War I and the Russian Provisional Government, which the party supported by entering a coalition with the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the liberal Constitutional Democrats.

In the 1917 election to the Constituent Assembly, the Mensheviks received about 3 percent of the vote, compared to the Bolsheviks' 23 percent. Mensheviks denounced the October Revolution as a coup d'état, though broadly supported the Bolshevik government during the Russian Civil War (while being critical of war communism). Their party was made illegal after the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921.

  1. ^ Radziwill, Catherine. [1915] 1920. "Bulgaria Joins the Great Wars." pp. 326–332 in The Great Events of the Great War 3, edited by C. F. Horne. New York: National Alumni. p. 328.
  2. ^ Aldanov, Mark Aleksandrovich. 1922. Lenin. New York: E. P. Dutton. OL 2400504W. p. 10
  3. ^ Brovkin, Vladimir N. 1991. The Mensheviks After October. Cornell University Press.
  4. ^ Basil, John D. 1983. The Mensheviks in the Revolution of 1917. Slavica Publishers.
  5. ^ Antonov-Saratovsky, Vladimir. 1931. The Trial of the Mensheviks: The verdict and sentence passed on the participants in the counter-revolutionary organization of the Mensheviks. Soviet Union: Centrizdai.
  6. ^ Broido, Vera. 1987. Lenin and the Mensheviks: The persecution of Socialists Under Bolshevism. Gower.
  7. ^ Ascher, Abraham. 1976. The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution. Cornell University Press.


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