Back Mensjewis Afrikaans منشفيك Arabic مينشيفيك ARZ Menxevique AST Menşeviklər Azerbaijani منشویکلر AZB Меньшевиктар Bashkir Меншавікі Byelorussian Меншавікі BE-X-OLD Меншевики Bulgarian
меньшевики́ | |
 Leaders of the Menshevik Party in Stockholm, Sweden, May 1917: Pavel Axelrod (left), Julius Martov (center), and Alexander Martinov | |
| Formation | 1903 |
|---|---|
| Dissolved | 1921 |
Key people |
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Parent organization | Russian Social Democratic Labour Party |
The Mensheviks (Russian: меньшевики, men'sheviki; from меньшинство, men'shinstvo, '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. 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.
In 1912, the RSDLP formally split into Bolshevik and Menshevik parties. The Mensheviks themselves split over World War I into a defencist faction led by Nikolay Chkheidze and an internationalist faction led by Martov. After the 1917 February Revolution, some Mensheviks led by Irakli Tsereteli joined the Provisional Government's coalition, whereas Martov unsuccessfully called for an all-socialist coalition. Following the October Revolution, the Mensheviks denounced it as a Bolshevik coup d'état, but supported the struggle against the Whites in the Russian Civil War. In the 1917 Constituent Assembly election, the Mensheviks received only 3 percent of the vote compared to the Bolsheviks' 23 percent, though were dominant in the Democratic Republic of Georgia from 1918 to 1921. The Menshevik party was banned after the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921; some of its emigres, such as Fyodor Dan and Raphael Abramovitch, became influential.