Menshevik

What was the quarrel about?

The visible issue at the Second Congress of the RSDLP, opened in Brussels in 1903 and finished in London, looked small. In paragraph one of the rules, on membership, Martov proposed that anyone cooperating under the party's direction was a member; Lenin, only someone active inside one of its organisations. Martov won the vote on the rules, but after the delegates of the Jewish Labour Bund and the economist current walked out, Lenin's supporters won the elections to the central bodies. The names majority (Bolsheviks) and minority (Mensheviks) came from that accidental vote, and twenty years of schism were built on it.

How did they differ from the Bolsheviks?

Behind the organisational question lay a difference of revolutionary strategy. The Mensheviks saw the coming Russian revolution as bourgeois democratic; its protagonist would be the bourgeoisie, and the workers' party should remain a party of extreme opposition. Cooperation with the liberals followed from this. The Bolsheviks held that the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of leading its own revolution, and that an alliance of workers and peasants would have to carry it through. Views of the party divided on the same line: the Mensheviks wanted a broad party of the European social democratic type, the Bolsheviks a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries. Through the revolution of 1905 and the Stolypin reaction the two sides reunited and split again; the liquidationist controversy over legal work, and the 1914 division into defencists and internationalists over the war, split the Mensheviks internally once more.

What did they choose in 1917?

After the February Revolution the Mensheviks held the majority in the soviets, and from May they entered the Provisional Government, the logical conclusion of the stage theory, which also made them answerable for the continuing war and the postponed land reform. From the summer their support moved rapidly to the Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks called the October Revolution a usurpation by a minority and walked out of the Congress of Soviets. In the civil war some joined anti-Soviet risings while the party mainstream wavered between opposing armed struggle and seeking legal opposition. After Kronstadt in 1921 arrests became general; with the deportation of the leadership abroad in 1922 the organisation inside Russia effectively ceased. The émigré leadership published Sotsialisticheskii vestnik in Berlin for many years.

How are they judged?

In Soviet historiography the Mensheviks were a byword for opportunism and betrayal, and in 1931 a show trial was staged against a 'Union Bureau of Mensheviks' that did not exist. Western and post-Soviet research asks different questions. The judgement that the Menshevik stage theory did not fit Russian reality coexists with the judgement that the danger they foresaw, the dictatorship of a minority, in fact appeared. That the Mensheviks built much of the practical machinery of the prewar Russian labour movement, and that Menshevik government was briefly tried in the Georgian Democratic Republic, have also been material for reassessment.