Menshevik

Menshevik, member of the non-Leninist wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, which evolved into a separate organization. It originated when a dispute over party membership requirements arose at the 1903 congress of the Social-Democratic Party. One group, led by L. Martov, opposed Lenin’s plan for a party restricted to professional revolutionaries and called for a mass party modelled after western European social democratic parties.

(Read Leon Trotsky’s 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.)

When Lenin’s followers obtained a temporary majority on the central committee and on the editorial board of the newspaper Iskra, they appropriated for themselves the name Bolshevik (Those of the Majority); Martov and his followers became the Mensheviks. After the 1903 congress the differences between the two factions grew. In addition to disapproving of Lenin’s emphasis on the dictatorial role of a highly centralized party, the Mensheviks maintained that the proletariat could not (nor should it) dominate a bourgeois revolution; therefore, unlike the Bolsheviks, they were willing to work with the bourgeois left to establish a liberal, capitalist regime, which they considered to be a necessary precursor to a Socialist society. They played active roles in the 1905 revolution, particularly in the St. Petersburg soviet, but afterward, like the Bolsheviks, they participated in the Dumas (parliaments), believing their success to be a step toward the creation of a democratic government. In 1912 the Social-Democratic Party was definitively split by Lenin; in 1914 the Mensheviks themselves became divided in their attitudes toward World War I.

Although they assumed leading roles in the soviets and provisional governments, created after the February Revolution (1917), and formally set up their own party in August, they were not sufficiently united to maintain a dominant position in the political developments of 1917. After the Bolshevik Revolution (October), they attempted to form a legal opposition but in 1922 were permanently suppressed; many Mensheviks went into exile.