Overview
The Mensheviks (Russian: меньшевики́, mensheviki, from меньшинство, menshinstvo, ‘minority’) 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.
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.