Mensheviks
Also known as Minority
The Mensheviks () 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. Mensheviks held more moderate and reformist views as compared to the Bolsheviks, and were led by figures including Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod.
AI overview
The Mensheviks were a moderate faction of the Russian Socialist party that split from Vladimir Lenin's more radical Bolshevik faction in 1903, favoring gradual reform rather than revolutionary change. They matter historically because this split represented a fundamental disagreement about how socialism should be achieved in Russia, ultimately leading to the Bolsheviks seizing power in the Russian Revolution while the Mensheviks faded from influence.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Key facts
- Political party.founded
- 1903
- Political party.parent_organization
- Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
- Political party.position
- Left-wing
- Political party.name
- Mensheviks
- Political party.native_name
- меньшевики́
- Political party.native_name_lang
- ru
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
9 sectionsContents
- History of the split
- 1903–1906
- 1906–1916
- 1912–1914
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Further reading
- External links
The Mensheviks () 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. Mensheviks held more moderate and reformist views as compared to the Bolsheviks, and were led by figures including Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod.
The initial point of disagreement was the Mensheviks' support for a broad party membership, as opposed to Lenin's support for a smaller party of professional revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks gained a majority on the Central Committee in 1903, although the power of the two factions fluctuated in the following years. Mensheviks were associated with Georgi Plekhanov's position that a bourgeois-democratic revolution and period of capitalism would need to occur before the conditions for a socialist revolution emerged. Some Mensheviks, notably Alexander Potresov, called for the party to suspend illegal revolutionary work to focus more on trade union work (legal since 1906) and elections to the Duma; this was condemned by Lenin.