10 Facts About Mensheviks

Mensheviks were one of the three dominant factions in the Russian socialist movement, the others being the Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.

Martov's supporters, who were in the minority in a crucial vote on the question of party membership, came to be called Mensheviks, derived from the Russian, while Lenin's adherents were known as Bolsheviks, from.

However, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were united in voting against the Bundist proposal, which lost 41 to 5.

In contrast to the 2nd Congress, the Mensheviks were in the majority from start to finish, yet Martov's definition of a party member, which had prevailed at the 1st Congress, was replaced by Lenin's.

However, after 1905 the Mensheviks were more inclined to work with the liberal bourgeois democratic parties such as the Constitutional Democrats because these would be the "natural" leaders of a bourgeois revolution.

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The Mensheviks came to argue for predominantly legal methods and trade union work, while the Bolsheviks favoured armed violence.

Some Mensheviks left the party after the defeat of 1905 and joined legal opposition organisations.

The Menshevik faction split further in 1917 at the middle of World War I Most Mensheviks opposed the war, but a vocal minority supported it in terms of "national defense".

Mensheviks opposed War Communism and in 1919 suggested an alternative programme.

The Mensheviks-Internationalists became the hub of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party.