The Revolutionary Masses
Although for the moment
they were technically two factions of a single party, and despite several later
attempts at reunification, the split between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks
proved irreparable. Only for a short period during the heady days of the
Revolution of 1905 the two wings of Russian Social-Democracy were able to
overcome their differences. |

However, after 1905 disagreements amongst Russian Marxists surfaced
again and the split between them began to widen. The Mensheviks
continued to believe in a mass organization, open to all
revolutionaries who were free to engage in democratic discussions
within the party. They were in favor of an alliance with all other
revolutionary and liberal parties and gave support to trade unions
in pursuing better wages and conditions for workers. They were
circumspect in their assessment of the viability of a proletarian
revolution in Russia and insisted that the bourgeois stage had to
occur first, so as to enable all the necessary preconditions for a
socialist revolution to mature.
By contrast,
Lenin’s faction proceeded to organize itself on the principles of a
tight-knit underground party of professional revolutionaries
subordinated to the will and authority of its supreme leadership in
the form of the Central Committee. It rejected co-operation with
other parties and dismissed the struggle for improved conditions of
workers as playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie and distracting
them from their vital political task of revolution. The Bolsheviks
also gradually fell in line with Lenin’s unorthodox idea of merging
the bourgeois and the proletarian revolutions into one.
By 1912 the
split between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks had become
permanent, with the two factions evolving effectively into two
separate parties. In the years and months leading to the October
Socialist Revolution of 1917, as the workers’ mood became more
militant, the Mensheviks lost their working-class support to the
Bolsheviks. As they believed that capitalism would exist for some
time, the Mensheviks were reluctant to undermine the property rights
of capitalists and landlords and to force the pace of events towards
revolution. As a consequence of this view, they were perceived by
the working classes as a less radical party with closer links to the
bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, saw no need to
compromise with a bourgeoisie they intended to overthrow. They could
therefore support workers’ control in industry, or peasant control
of the land. For Russia’s peasants and workers such a program had
much greater appeal. They increasingly sided with the Bolsheviks
whom they saw as more ‘working-class’ and more revolutionary.