Faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
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
Leaders of the Menshevik Party at Norra Bantorget in Stockholm, Sweden, May 1917 (Pavel Axelrod, Julius Martov, and Alexander Martinov)
Formation
1903
Dissolved
1921
Key people
Julius Martov
Pavel Axelrod
Alexander Potresov
Alexander Martinov (later Bolshevik)
Fyodor Dan
Irakli Tsereteli
Leon Trotsky (later Bolshevik)
Noe Zhordania
Parent organization
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
Formerly called
"softs"
The Mensheviks (Russian: меньшевики́, mensheviki, from меньшинство, menshinstvo, 'minority')[1][2] 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. 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.
^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.
^Aldanov, Mark Aleksandrovich. 1922. Lenin. New York: E. P. Dutton. OL 2400504W. p. 10
^Brovkin, Vladimir N. 1991. The Mensheviks After October. Cornell University Press.
^Basil, John D. 1983. The Mensheviks in the Revolution of 1917. Slavica Publishers.
^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.
^Broido, Vera. 1987. Lenin and the Mensheviks: The persecution of Socialists Under Bolshevism. Gower.
^Ascher, Abraham. 1976. The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution. Cornell University Press.
Congress in 1903. The Mensheviks were led by Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod. The initial point of disagreement was the Mensheviks' support for a broad...
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Vladimir Lenin, held a meeting in Prague, and expelled Mensheviks from the party. In response, the Mensheviks, Leon Trotsky's followers, the Jewish Bund and other...
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election, the Mensheviks had lost most of their influence in the workers' soviets. The election result confirmed the marginalization of the Mensheviks, obtaining...
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the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks excluded the Right SRs and Mensheviks from the government on 14 June for associating with counterrevolutionaries...
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the exploiters.". The Congress saw the RSDLP split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as a result of a dispute between Lenin and Julius Martov over the major...
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the party split into two wings: the gradualist Mensheviks and the more radical Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks believed that the Russian working class was insufficiently...
land would be distributed to them by the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. Refusing to continue living as before, they increasingly took measures...
multi-party political system led by the Georgian Social Democratic Party (Mensheviks). Initially, DRG was a protectorate of the German Empire. However, after...
Vladimir Lenin's "Bolsheviks" and Julius Martov's "Mensheviks". Stalin detested many of the Mensheviks in Georgia and aligned himself with the Bolsheviks...
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