Menshevik Defencists and Internationalists

The quarrel

When the First World War broke out in August 1914 the Menshevik Duma deputies joined the Bolshevik deputies in condemning it as an imperialist and annexationist war on both sides. Within weeks a defencist current appeared among the Mensheviks under Georgi Plekhanov and Aleksandr Potresov, who held that on Russia's side the war was defensive and that a Russian defeat would be not only a national catastrophe but a blow to the whole Russian labour movement; Plekhanov urged voting for the war credits in the Duma. The largest defencist paper in the RSDLP was Nachalo, and the largest defencist group was Plekhanov's Yedinstvo (1914-1918). Plekhanov, the camp's ideologue, treated Germany as the chief culprit and the actions of Russia and its allies as justified.

A larger number of Mensheviks instead demanded a speedy general democratic peace without annexations or indemnities as the prologue to a European revolution, under the slogan "Neither victory nor defeat"; this position was called internationalist. Unlike the Leninists, the Menshevik internationalists did not call for turning the imperialist war into civil war. The schism cut across existing party lines and did not coincide with the Bolshevik-Menshevik split: defencists and internationalists were found among Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries alike, and the two camps met in international conferences at Zimmerwald and Kienthal in 1915 and 1916.

1917

After the February Revolution the boundary blurred again. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who had been Zimmerwaldists now adopted "revolutionary defencism", supporting a continued war effort in defence of the revolution; among the Mensheviks this was the position of Dan and Tsereteli, who dominated the soviets and the Provisional Government until October. To their left, the Menshevik-Internationalists formed as the party's left wing in May 1917 and were joined by leaders returning from exile, most notably Martov. They opposed the pro-war line of Dan and Tsereteli and controlled the party organisations in Kharkov, Tula and other places, with some influence in the Petrograd branch. At the Menshevik congress in August 1917 they were about a third of the delegates, and a substantial part of the faction broke away to the Bolsheviks that month. Martov remained in a minority in his own party until the Bolsheviks took power.

The unification congress of August 1917 elected a Central Committee of 16 defencists and 8 internationalists under Axelrod. At the Extraordinary Congress of December 1917 the internationalist faction won, and the right wings, Potresov's defencists and the "revolutionary defencists" around Liber, refused to enter the Central Committee, declining political responsibility for the congress's new party line. At the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918 the Menshevik-Internationalists held two of the 306 seats on the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

Afterwards

Some revolutionary defencists later moved back towards the internationalist camp. The right went the other way: Potresov's and Plekhanov's groups supported the Franco-British intervention and joined the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, whose main aim was the armed overthrow of Soviet power. The party mainstream, with the internationalists dominant, opposed armed risings against the Soviets and tried to hold a legal opposition position, yet it suffered constant repression from the Bolshevik side, including the VTsIK decree of 14 June 1918 excluding the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets and the closure of socialist newspapers.