Mensheviks

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.