Mensheviks were members of a faction inside the All-Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), the Marxist party which provided the ideas and leadership for the Russian Revolution and subsequent Soviet state. In 1903, only five years after its founding congress, the RSDLP split at a crucial party congress held in London (at that time the vast bulk of the party leadership was in exile), as a result of political manipulation by Lenin; some unity was restored to the RSDLP in 1906.
The Mensheviks, the name means simply ‘minority’ in Russian, believed that a Marxist revolution was impossible in Russia because it was so underdeveloped economically, and favoured a period of reform and economic progress before anything like socialism or communism could be introduced. After the February revolution of 1917 they formed a party of their own, opposed to Lenin’s Bolsheviks, and indeed were initially more popular than the latter in most parts of Russia. They were overthrown, along with the bourgeois parties, in the October revolution (or, as some would describe it, coup d’état) organized by the Bolsheviks, and the party was gradually suppressed.
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