Mensheviks

gigatos | June 12, 2022

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Summary

The Mensheviks (in Russian меньшевики, menshevikí, “member of the minority”) were the moderate faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers” Party (POSDR) that emerged from its second congress in the summer of 1903 after the dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Yuli Martov. A distinct current within Russian Marxism, in 1912 it became a separate party. It played a prominent role in the interrevolutionary period of 1917, both for its control of the Petrograd Soviet and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) and for its participation in the Provisional Government overthrown in the October Revolution.

It never formed a cohesive movement in ideology or organization. Its leaders often disagreed among themselves, were sometimes closer to the Bolsheviks, the main rivals for working-class support, than to other Mensheviks, and varied their position on fundamental issues on several occasions. Pavel Axelrod and Yuli Martov became the main ideologues of the Menshevik current.

Very active in the organization of the Soviets, especially the St. Petersburg Soviet, during the 1905 Revolution, after its failure they abandoned the idea of armed struggle, focused on trying to form a legal party and advocated a progressive liquidation of tsarism through a bourgeois revolution, in which the third state would share power. Their separation from the party became final in 1912.

They dominated the Soviets of the country between the February and October Revolutions, together with the Social Revolutionaries, except for those of Petrograd and Moscow, whose control they lost earlier. Convinced of the impossibility of the Russian proletariat taking power alone and that a premature socialist revolution would lead to civil war and its defeat, they cooperated with the new Provisional Government and tried to moderate the demands of the population. They entered the second cabinet, two months after the first revolution, and tried in vain to avoid social polarization. Unable to combine what they considered to be the interests of the state with the reforms desired by their followers, from mid-summer the party fell into paralysis. Despite the failure of the coalition government and the loss of power in successive cabinets, the Mensheviks continued to reject the alternative of a government based on the Soviets, which they believed would favor the Bolsheviks.

After the October Revolution and until the forced dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks tried to mediate between the new Bolshevik Government and the Social Revolutionaries and to reach a peaceful agreement between the socialist political parties. After the dissolution, they tried to wrest power from the Bolsheviks not through insurrections, but through electoral victories that would give them back the influence lost in 1917. Their popularity increased in the spring of 1918, both because of the economic crisis and because of their political and economic proposals. In reaction to the opposition”s electoral victories, the Bolshevik government dissolved the Soviets in which it had lost control, leading to protests that provoked government repression. The opposition press was closed down, some of its leaders were arrested and Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries were expelled from the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. After various periods of repression and some tolerance during the civil war, the party was finally banned in 1921. Some of its members went into exile, while others cooperated with the Bolshevik government.

The Mensheviks emerged in the summer of 1903, when the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers” Party was held, bringing together twenty-six workers” organizations with the aim of unifying them and putting an end to frequent internal disputes. What began as an attempt at union turned into a bitter dispute on the twenty-second day of the congress when it was debated who should be considered a member of the party.

The Mensheviks, headed by Yuli Martov, maintained that it was not necessary to demand membership in one of the base organizations of the party as a condition to be recognized as a member of it; they thought it was preferable to have a broad party base, unlike the single party model of “vanguard of the proletariat” proposed by Lenin. They considered that in Russia a bourgeois revolution should be carried out first of all, during which the workers” party would be the main actor, given the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie. In a social democratic line, they proposed the establishment of a representative democracy while maintaining the capitalist structure of production; in their opinion, the level of development of Russia prevented the establishment of socialism, only possible according to Marxist theory in a country with advanced capitalist development. The party model defended by Martov was the Social Democratic Party of Germany, with a broad working class base, as opposed to the professional conspiratorial organization that Lenin preferred.

Lenin, for his part, maintained that the leadership of the party should correspond to the revolutionary intelligentsia, trained in Marxism, which, through a hierarchical organization should lead the workers, preventing them from falling into syndicalism and economism. The party should be formed by professional revolutionaries dedicated entirely to preparing the revolution, he maintained. Mass organizations such as trade unions could support the action of the party, but most of its members could not belong to it.

Suspecting a change of doctrine and personal ambitions on Lenin”s part, all the editors of Iskra (who had organized the congress), except Plekhanov and Lenin himself, opposed Lenin”s proposal. Although Martov”s organizational position on the party had the majority support of the delegates present at the congress (28 votes against 23 in favor of Lenin”s proposal), he immediately found himself in the minority when it came to electing the steering committee, because some delegates withdrew from the congress because it did not accept certain proposals of their interest; The congress, assembled to forge the unity of the movement, succeeded only in appearance, creating in reality two rival currents which fought for power in the party. …

The rifts were also due to the fact that Lenin”s adversaries blamed him for dividing the main leaders by the exclusion of part of them from the party leadership approved at the congress -they soon omitted similar criticism of Plekhanov-. For the Mensheviks, the unity of the party was based on two principles: the decisions adopted at its congresses -hardly democratic in an underground formation- and the union of its main leaders, which in their view Lenin had destroyed at the congress and which they wished to recover by reconstituting the former editorial board of Iskra.

In the months following the congress, internal disputes began between Lenin”s supporters and his opponents. At the meeting of the Foreign League in late October 1903, which represented the party abroad, Martov won a slim majority against the Bolsheviks and condemnation of Lenin”s position. In early November, Plekhanov, still the leading exponent of Russian Marxism, abandoned Lenin, accusing him of “Robespierre” and joined the Mensheviks, returning them to the editorial board of Iskra. Isolated among the leadership, Lenin had to cede control of Iskra to the Mensheviks. The harsh attacks directed at him by the Mensheviks – which included personal criticisms beyond political dissent – nevertheless enhanced his figure, while the disputes disorganized the party. The Menshevik leaders felt that Lenin was preventing a leadership made up of more authoritative figures than the one that emerged from the congress from taking the reins of the party, and hoped that their harsh criticism would wrest control from him.

Until the publication of two essays by Axelrod in late 1903 and early 1904, the dispute seemed simply a power struggle of ambitious and self-centered leaders. Axelrod, on the contrary, claimed that the dispute had created two factions holding completely opposite conceptions of the form of the party: one hierarchical with the organization controlled by the top and the other with a mass party controlled by the rank and file. Axelrod”s thesis that the party should become a mass organization controlled by the rank and file and made up of politically mature workers became one of the key elements of Menshevism. While Lenin”s opponents received Axelrod”s articles as a revelation, Lenin himself reacted with fury, rejecting even after Axelrod”s writings, however, the Mensheviks did not manage to form a united movement, but maintained great dissensions and changes of position. The apparent unity of Lenin”s opponents began to crack already at the end of 1904. For his part, Lenin had considerable support among the party activists in Russia – often younger and less cosmopolitan than the émigrés – whom the Menshevik leaders soon included in their criticism. The sectarian use of Iskra, the fact that they had taken control of it despite the decisions of the congress and the criticism of the Russian activists as a measure of indirect attack on Lenin also harmed the Mensheviks.

Both factions of the party were controlled by intellectuals. The Mensheviks, however, had a larger following among the minorities of the Russian Empire and both Georgians and Jews played a particularly important role in the current. Of the fifty-seven delegates to the Second Congress, twenty-five had been Jews: six Bund members, four Bolsheviks and fifteen Mensheviks (out of a total of seventeen Menshevik delegates).

The Mensheviks were also closer to the Western European socialist tradition, and admired the mass organizations of these parties, especially the German one and its tolerance of internal currents. Many Mensheviks saw these parties as the model for the Russian party, which partly prevented them from appreciating the differences in conditions between Western Europe and Russia: unlike the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks never presented an attractive program to the peasants, the great majority of the country”s population. The fraction was fundamentally urban and, in general, skeptical about the possible revolutionary role of the peasants.

Despite the changes of position throughout their history, the Mensheviks maintained certain characteristics:

Some of these, such as the need to involve the proletariat in the bourgeois revolution without taking power, the lack of interest in the peasantry or its doctrinaire rigidity, influenced its final decline and disappearance. The first derived from its conviction that none of the opposition groups to the tsarist system was strong enough to overthrow it and remain in power and that only cooperation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would be capable of putting an end to it. Any attempt to seize power alone would end in disaster, both because of the abandonment of the revolution by the liberals and because of the impossibility for the socialists alone to establish a democratic system among a population fundamentally peasant and subjected to the tsarist system. The peasants, reactionaries, would end up achieving the restoration of tsarism. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who assigned a relevant role in the elimination of the system of tsarist oppression to the poor peasants, the Mensheviks maintained that the liberals, also interested in the end of the regime, would be the main allies of the scarce urban proletariat in the political transformation.

Faced with the discontent stirred up by the defeat in the Russo-Japanese war, the Russian bourgeoisie began to demand political reforms from the tsarist autocracy. The position to be adopted in the situation of political crisis was different for Bolsheviks and Mensheviks: Lenin argued that the Russian bourgeoisie was not a progressive force and that, despite its criticisms of power, it would never completely undermine the authority of the monarchy and that the working class should take power directly; The Mensheviks, led mainly by Axelrod, argued that a campaign of pressure on the Zemstvos by workers” demonstrations would force the latter to defend more leftist measures, would strengthen the political consciousness of the workers and would maintain their theory that the first revolution in a backward country like Russia should be The Socialists should leave the power arising from the revolution in the hands of the parties of the middle classes given the bourgeois nature of the process and not participate in an eminently bourgeois government. The differences between the leaders of the two currents, however, gradually disappeared as part of the Mensheviks radicalized, who considered the passage to the socialist phase of the revolution possible. The cooperation preceded the convening of the IV Congress, which had as its objective the reunification of the fractions, among others.

For the first time the election of delegates to the congress was by means of regulated elections, with those elected representing the party membership. In it the Mensheviks won sixty-six delegates to the Bolsheviks” forty-six. Revolutionary decadence already in April 1906, when the congress finally met, caused many Mensheviks to again turn away from the Bolsheviks” positions. At the congress, the Mensheviks advocated an end to the boycott of the Duma elections, given the anti-government outcome of the first elections. In 1907, the Social Democrats ran for the first time in parliamentary elections with good results, sixty-five deputies.

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Estrangement and attempts at reconciliation

With the revolution repressed by the government, the apathy of the workers in Russia, the result of the economic depression and the turmoil of the previous years, sapped the strength of the party, which went into decline. The experience of the revolution, however, served to define more clearly the differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, who began to disagree on issues that had not previously separated them. Among these disagreements were:

The Bolsheviks, on the contrary, believed that the revolutionary failure of 1905 had confirmed their thesis that only a centralized and professional party centered on underground work could act effectively in the country. The middle classes were also ruled out as a progressive force, and Lenin”s supporters turned to the cooperation of workers and peasants. Despite the differences, the party was formally reunified and held two congresses (the IV congress also elected a joint central committee, with three Bolsheviks and seven Mensheviks). Despite this, the period of tsarist reaction prior to the outbreak of World War I sharpened the differences between the two currents of Russian social democracy.

In 1907 the Mensheviks re-established relations with the Bund, which had split from the party during the Second Congress after their proposal to organize it in a federal form, as a union of national parties that would have given them autonomy in Jewish affairs, was rejected. The Bund, with great support among its rank and file but also great affinity with Menshevik positions, decided to rejoin the POSDR. The collaboration between the two groups was very close.

In decline, the Mensheviks remained formally within the party, despite their criticism of the revolutionary methods of the Bolsheviks. In 1908 their fortunes improved: in exile a publication expressing their ideas was created and in Russia three centers close to the current were formed: one in Georgia, another in the capital, led by Aleksandr Potrésov and another that grouped those who worked in organizations that included workers, such as trade unions or cooperatives.

Between 1909 and 1914, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks engaged in a new dispute, that of “liquidationism”. An ambiguous term often used simply to discredit the adversary, it defined those who, according to their accuser, wished to dissolve the clandestine organization of the party and turn it into a vague grouping, opposed the revolutionary struggle and had become mere reformists of bourgeois tendencies. The main difference consisted in the priority that each current gave to the clandestine activities as opposed to the legal ones tolerated by tsarism: while the majority of Mensheviks gave priority to the latter, Lenin advocated concentrating mainly on the former. The Menshevik liquidationists – also criticized by their own ranks – devoted themselves to trying to use the legal means (press, trade unions) to spread the socialist ideal, to try to forge alliances with the liberals which would limit the power of the autocratic government and to broaden the organization of the workers. All the Menshevik currents agreed that, given the lack of a democratic bourgeois stage in the history of Russia and the need to put an end to the autocracy, the seizure of power was conditioned to a social change which required a first bourgeois period in which the socialists should support in a limited way the new bourgeois Government, but not enter it nor arouse excessive hopes in the proletariat.

In January 1910, the last serious attempt to unify the party fractions took place in Paris; the various journals of the currents were suppressed and both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks became part of the editorial board of the party journal, Social-Democrat. Unity again proved fictitious as the factions did not fulfill the conditions necessary to maintain it: neither did the Mensheviks expel the liquidationists -who rejected the party”s clandestine activities- from their ranks, nor did the Bolsheviks put an end to the “expropriations” and other violent actions condemned by the Mensheviks. Already in the autumn, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were again at loggerheads and the arrest of Alekséi Rýkov broke up the Bolshevik current in favor of concord with the Mensheviks. This allowed Lenin to prepare the Prague Bolshevik conference of January 1912, which consummated the official break-up of the party and the formal separation of Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.

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Schism

Despite the disputes, there were several attempts at reconciliation between the two currents between 1907 and 1912. Lenin, however, opposed to collaboration, gathered his followers, just over one-fifth of the party, in Prague in January 1912, renamed the meeting the “Sixth Congress of the RDRP” and expelled the Menshevik “liquidationists”. The maneuver officially fractured the party, giving an advantage in the search for workers” support to Lenin”s supporters. Despite temporary cooperation during the Duma elections after the dissolution of the Second Duma by Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, in which the Mensheviks won seven deputies and the Bolsheviks six, dissension soon divided the different factions again.

In the following two years, several of the legal organizations, created after the revolution and until then hotbeds of Menshevism, switched to the Bolsheviks. In August 1912, the St. Petersburg metalworkers” union, the most important in the capital, became Bolshevik-majority. In April 1914, they won half of the representatives of the printers” union of the capital, the theoretical “citadel of Menshevism”. On the eve of the World War, the Bolsheviks controlled the great majority of the trade union boards in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The Bolsheviks” medal against their opponents was due in part to the rapid growth of the urban proletariat in the years before the world war; the new workers were more receptive to the Bolsheviks” extremist tactics and aims and to their better and more extensive underground organization. The great efforts of the Mensheviks to forge a well-organized workers movement with moderate aims failed and gave way to the emergence of a more extremist one, often headed by new Bolshevik leaders, younger than those who had presided over the organizations until 1912.

The attempts of the International Socialist Bureau to achieve the reunification of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and the other fractions (a total of eleven) by putting pressure on the former and calling an international congress for August 1914 were frustrated by the outbreak of war, which brought new grounds for disagreement between the two fractions.

In 1914, Martov, as well as the Bolsheviks, opposed head-on participation in World War I. The seven deputies of the Duma, in union with the five Bolsheviks, refused to approve the war credits requested by the Government and presented a declaration against it. However, in the midst of the crisis of the Second International, the Mensheviks maintained differentiated and even divergent positions on the war: Pyotr Maslov, Kusma Gvozdev and Emanuel Smirnov called for “defending the fatherland”, even Georgy Plekhanov became a defensist; the rest of the Mensheviks initially joined the “internationalist” camp, although Nikolai Chkheidze, a deputy in the Duma, published Nashe Dielo (“Our Cause”) with a position more conciliatory to defensism than the official position of the Menshevik Organization Committee, expressed by Spectator, Martynov and Pavel Axelrod, while Martov, being a member of that committee, came to collaborate with Trotsky in Nashe Slovo (“Our Word”) with a position of rejection of all defensism.

The majority of the Mensheviks adhered to the internationalist position: opposition to the war as an imperialist adventure, call for the unity of the socialist movement and pressure on the governments to put an end to the fighting and achieve peace without annexations or war indemnities. This majority, however, was divided: the “Siberian Zimmerwaldists”, among whom Irakli Tsereteli or Vladimir Woytinsky stood out, considered that the defense of Russia could be admissible under certain circumstances, giving rise after the February Revolution to “revolutionary defensism”, which argued that the defense of the new republic was permissible, unlike that of the previous tsarism. This position became the majority among the Mensheviks after the overthrow of the Tsar. The defensists, with the exception of the more extreme ones like Plekhanov, opposed the war on principle, but advocated the defense of the country together with the rest of its “vital forces”, a position which they hoped would also serve to forge an anti-Tsarist alliance with the bourgeoisie. The defensist attitude was joined mainly by Duma deputies, provincial intellectuals, Mensheviks engaged in legal work and propagandists from Petrograd and Moscow.

The Mensheviks rejected Lenin”s “defeatist” position, the most extreme among Marxists, that the socialists should work to achieve the defeat of their respective countries, transform the conflict into a civil war and put an end to the Second International, which he considered a failure. Some of the most prominent left Mensheviks, such as Aleksandra Kolontai, switched to the Bolshevik lines due to differences over whether or not to intervene in the war.

The February Revolution

Neither the Mensheviks nor the other revolutionary parties foresaw the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1917. Mass protests, tolerated by the indifferent troops, led to the fall of the government and the abdication of the tsar and put an end to the monarchy in a few days.

A liberal government was then formed, headed by Prince Georgy Lvov, which, however, was conditioned by the existence of the Petrograd Soviet, which in reality had the loyalty of the masses. Russia came to have a dual power, in which the government had the responsibility, but not the power to govern, while the council had the power, but did not direct the affairs of state. The situation generated conflicts, friction, confusion and inefficiency in the administration of the State, which was not able to solve the serious problems of the country such as war, economic crisis or political reorganization.

The Mensheviks, in alliance with the Social Revolutionaries, controlled the Soviet of the capital, in which the Bolsheviks soon formed a fraction of small size (barely forty out of about three thousand delegates). Moreover, thanks to their political figures and their better organization, the Mensheviks dominated the Social Revolutionaries. The radical left, with most of its leaders in internal or external exile, far from the capital, had little influence at the beginning on the leadership of the capital”s Soviet.

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The Mensheviks and the Provisional Government

Regarding the war, his position was that of the centrist majority formed by the revolutionary defensists, whose main figure was Irakli Tsereteli. According to them, the search for peace should be joined to the defense of Russia. However, a minority, headed by Martov, continued to defend the original internationalism and the immediate beginning of peace talks to end the world conflict.

Convinced of the bourgeois nature of the revolution, the Mensheviks ruled out taking power. The experiences of 1905, their fear of splitting the reformists should they embrace radicalism and their conviction of the inability of the proletariat to run the state reinforced this position. In the Mensheviks” view, the correct interpretation of Marx meant that socialism could only emerge in an advanced capitalist society, not in the Russian situation with still partial capitalism; according to the Menshevik view, the Russian revolution was bourgeois and any attempt to introduce socialism was doomed to failure. The objective should be, in their view, the establishment of a democratic parliamentary republic which would eventually allow the implementation of reforms tending towards socialism. However, during the long crisis of 1905-1917, the fraction had been unable to define a clear position on whether, in the period of bourgeois rule, it should devote itself to the organization of the working class and tacitly support the bourgeoisie, or to pressure them to obtain social reforms. The relationship which should exist between socialists and bourgeoisie had remained unclear.

At the beginning, the Mensheviks limited themselves to supporting the liberal government on the condition that it maintained the democratic reforms. They wanted a peaceful resolution of the class conflicts and to achieve the cooperation of the bourgeoisie in the reforms and in the defense of the revolution which had put an end to the monarchy. To this end, while initially refusing to enter the government, they maintained indirect control of the actions of the Council of Ministers through the Petrograd Soviet. After the April crisis, they decided, together with the Social Revolutionaries, to enter the Government. Their idea was not to seize power nor to form a Socialist Government, which they considered premature, but to strengthen the social-liberal alliance which they considered necessary to put an end to the remains of the previous regime and to avoid the fall of the Liberal Government. Their alliance with the liberals was, as Marxists, temporary and opportunistic: it was only a coalition between future enemies to put an end to the old regime, a preliminary step to a future confrontation between the liberals, supporters of capitalism, and the socialists, opposed to it. At the same time, the experience of 1905, in which the liberals had not shown themselves to be sufficiently revolutionary in the opinion of the Mensheviks, led them to try to play a more prominent role in political change, with greater initiative. Another proposal, defended by other currents, which advocated the entry of the party as the majority force in the cabinet to impose the desired reforms was finally discarded in favor of that defended by the Menshevik leadership of the party.

From its entry into the Council of Ministers and until the autumn, the party was both a party of government and the one presiding over the powerful All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), with a sector, the internationalist, critical in the dual system of power and increasingly powerful due to the growing radicalization of the workers. The Menshevik objective of cooperation with the bourgeoisie to avoid a civil conflict and maintain industrial production persisted once the party decided to participate in the Council of Ministers. At the same time, they favored the organization of the workers in various organizations (cooperatives, trade unions, arbitration boards…) which should strengthen the revolution in the face of a possible reaction and favor the formation of an organized proletariat, with greater political importance and greater possibilities of improving their economic situation.

Upon coming into government, Menshevism, in alliance with the Social Revolutionaries and the Liberals, maintained the Russian Army”s participation at the front and assumed responsibility for continuing the war in alliance with France, Great Britain and Serbia.Despite calling for the start of peace negotiations, the Liberals showed no interest in the Socialists” proposals.Attempts to use the disorganized and ineffective Second International to get the talks underway were a failure.

The majority position had to face two opposing minorities: on the right, Potrésov defended more vehemently the continuation of the war; on the left, another more numerous current, that of the internationalists, opposed the coalition with the bourgeoisie. Although Martov openly opposed this policy of collaboration and Axelrod advised opening peace negotiations with Germany and Austria, Menshevism supported the policies of Fyodor Dan and the Minister of the Provisional Government Tsereteli to continue the war, postpone the agrarian reform and delay the elections to the Constituent Assembly; thus losing the sympathy of the working masses, who turned to Bolshevism together with the peasants, who until then had mainly supported the Social Revolutionaries. The coalition government, incapable of maintaining order and of applying or slowing down the reforms, was paralyzed.

During the spring, however, with the party conference in May, the defensist position of the leaders of the capital council was temporarily strengthened – especially by the support of the provincial organizations for the coalition and for keeping Russia in the world conflict until the signing of a universal peace; several organizations, such as the Bundists, the Latvian Social Democrats and other minor ones joined the party. The internationalists, the most important critical current, were troublesome but unable to threaten the position of Tsereteli and his supporters and ended up in any case by supporting the main measures of the defensist center (the Kérenski offensive, the war credit to the Government or to the party candidates in the various elections).

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Crisis, paralysis and decadence

Workers” support for the coalition with the liberals, however, was low, and already in the Petrograd municipal elections of May, in which the traditional supporters of the Mensheviks, the more specialized workers (the Mensheviks remained mainly the party of the less politicized and specialized workers and, increasingly, that of the radical urban intelligentsia), the Mensheviks did not heed the warning of the ballot box. The Menshevik ministers, however, did not heed the warning of the ballot boxes. In particular, the Menshevik ministers, more and more distant from the Petrograd Soviet and more engrossed in their governmental task, ignored the change of loyalties of the proletariat. The growing radicalization of the workers of the capital, the result of the disillusionment of their hopes for change and of the ever more intense economic crisis, worked to the disadvantage of the Mensheviks. This disillusionment and the feeling of social division between workers and privileged classes, however, clashed at first with the continued support of the workers for the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet, which favored the government coalition. Menshevik support for the coalition, their attitude of neutrality in the labor conflicts between workers and bosses and their concern for the maintenance of production and for the economy in general increased the perception among the workers of betrayal of the working class they claimed to defend. The differences in the perception of reality between the Menshevik leadership and the workers of the capital grew from the spring onward. A major source of discredit for the party was its leadership of the Ministry of Labor, unable to end the economic crisis or to satisfy the demands of the workers. The Mensheviks had hoped to be able to moderate these and implement certain legal reforms with the cooperation of the employers. Reality dashed their illusions: the economic deterioration, the increase in labor conflicts, the radicalization of workers” demands and the weakening of the Administration caused the Menshevik reforms to fail. Moreover, the Mensheviks in the ministry did not manage to impose many of their initial objectives: not only were they unable to pass the eight-hour working day, the freedom to strike, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance or the reform of the factory inspection service, but they had to make concessions for the few laws they managed to enact. Some of these were never put into practice or were implemented late in the summer or in the autumn. Paradoxically, the two main labor laws were not the work of the Mensheviks, but of the liberals in the first government formed after the revolution. The desires for moderation of workers” demands, the concern for what they believed to be the feasible limits of the Russian economy, and their conviction that the country lacked the means to improve the conditions of the workers gave the impression that Minister Matvei Skobelev and his co-religionists had capitulated to the interests of the industrialists. Although the goal of moderation extended to the entire population, the Government was unable to impose it on industrialists and merchants, while the Mensheviks, as members of the coalition cabinet and supposed representatives of the workers, were burdened with the task of trying to apply it to them.

The industrial crisis of May and June undermined popular support for the social-liberal coalition, but it did not diminish the support of the Menshevik leadership for it. While the ministers remained engrossed in their government tasks without satisfying the aspirations of their followers, the Mensheviks in the Soviet limited themselves to ensuring the continued support of the Soviet for the Government and its measures and to thwarting any opposition. Martov advocated after the July Days the establishment of an exclusively socialist Government which would bring peace to the country, take control of industry and the economy in general, and prepare the convocation of the Russian Constituent Assembly. The revolt had failed mainly because of the refusal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, dominated by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, to take power as demanded by the demonstrators. Despite the protests and the clear loss of popular support, the advocates maintained their preference for the government coalition. Martov”s proposal, which constituted the constant alternative to the social-liberal coalition until the autumn, was rejected.

At the party congress, which opened at the polytechnic institute in the capital on Aug. 18, July.

After Kornilov”s failed coup, the party adopted a more leftist and anti-Kadet stance, but it was in crisis, with the various factions increasingly divided and ready to field separate candidates in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. The Menshevik leadership”s decision to continue coalitions with the Kadets in September despite the radicalization of the masses polarized the party and caused many workers to shift their support to the Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks who worked in the government and saw the solution to the crisis in greater cooperation with the bourgeoisie were increasingly at odds with Mensheviks closer to the Soviets, who tended to support the increasingly extreme demands of the workers.

The decline of the Mensheviks was intense: from 248 delegates obtained at the First Congress of the Soviets they went on to win only about 80 for the Second. For their part, the Bolsheviks, who had counted 105 delegates at the First Congress, went down to 300 in November. The largest Menshevik organization in the capital, with about 10,000 at the beginning of the revolutionary period, practically ceased to exist in the autumn. In the elections to the assembly held at the end of autumn, the party barely managed to gather 1.4 million votes against the 16 million of the Social Revolutionaries or the 9.8 million of the Bolsheviks. Many of them, moreover, came from Georgia, where the party had already begun to take a nationalist course which would eventually separate it from the rest of the organization. In the big cities and in the areas most active in the revolution the support had been miniscule. The Mensheviks had less than twenty deputies in the assembly. Despite the Mensheviks” criticism of heterodoxy, the Bolsheviks, who supported the various demands of the population and had made a fundamental contribution to the failure of Kornilov”s coup in September, had growing support. In the council elections of the same month in Petrograd and Moscow, the Bolsheviks obtained a majority for the first time. The loss of Menshevik and Social Revolutionary support was due to the lack of political and economic improvements: peace talks were stalled, inflation was rising, industrial production was falling, and the ability to forge new coalitions with the liberals seemed exhausted. The immobility of the defensists facilitated the growth of sympathy for the Bolsheviks in the face of governmental weakness and paralysis. The Russian masses had had enough of the moderation, consensus and agreements with the bourgeoisie advocated by the Mensheviks and transferred their support to the Bolsheviks, who seemed to promise quick solutions to their problems.

By the end of October, the influence of the internationalists had succeeded in getting the central committee to demand the resignation from the party of the Menshevik ministers, even though it had not succeeded in getting their withdrawal from the cabinet a few weeks earlier. On December 31, 1917Jul.

The October Revolution

Menshevik weakness and internal divisions were reflected at the Second Congress of the Soviets: of the more than six hundred delegates assembled, the Mensheviks had the smallest delegation of the three main socialist groupings: a mere eighty-three delegates compared to more than three hundred Bolsheviks and almost two hundred Social Revolutionaries. In addition, the delegation was divided between defensists (fifty delegates) and internationalists (thirty-three). Finally, the motions of the congress were approved once the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had withdrawn.

The various Menshevik currents were united in their rejection of the Bolshevik seizure of power, carried out with little opposition in the capital. The motions passed in the days of the Bolshevik coup, however, reflected the difference in factions and the intermittent control of one or the other of the central committee: on 24 OctoberJul.

Shortly after the coup (Nov. 1-July.

The talks failed because of the rejection by Lenin and his supporters of the Mensheviks” demand to stop political repression; the Mensheviks came to predict a short life for Lenin”s Government, convinced of the inappropriateness of his seizure of power and that he was holding on to it through terror. Under Martov”s leadership, the party became an opposition critical of some of the Government”s measures. At the extraordinary congress held between the October Revolution and the meeting of the Russian Constituent Assembly in which Martov”s position had won, the party approved to defend the formation of a new coalition government of the socialist parties, including the Bolsheviks, emerging from the constituent assembly, which made it a long-term objective, given the opposition of the Bolshevik leadership to accept the pre-eminence of the assembly. The party was also approved to remain in the councils, but not in their leading bodies controlled by the Bolsheviks. Participation in the revolutionary military committees (under Bolshevik control) or in the defense committees of the constituent assembly (of the opposition) was forbidden.

Martov also opposed the party”s entry into the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) after the coalition of Bolsheviks and Left Social-Revolutionaries as long as this body did not declare its readiness to transfer power to the constituent assembly. The proposal would have left the Bolsheviks with half the seats in the VTsIK, while the other parties would have shared the other half. With the possibility that the Sovnarkom would not cede power to the constituent assembly – in which the Bolsheviks would be in the minority – but would instead suppress it becoming increasingly clear, Martov refused to participate in an institution that could serve to justify the dissolution of the assembly. The defensists were clear in their refusal to join the VTsIK, but the internationalists were divided and some of them decided to participate as individuals, in the hope, which Martov did not share, of favoring the moderates and left social-revolutionaries and defeating Lenin”s supporters.The party arrived extremely weakened at the extraordinary congress which began in the capital on 30 NovemberJuly.

Period of institutional boycott

After the Bolsheviks suppressed the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the Bolsheviks continued to allow the opposition of the other socialist parties in the Soviets. The dissolution was condemned by the Mensheviks. and the end of freedom of the press. On December 1, 1917, the government had closed its main newspaper.

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Electoral victories in the spring of 1918 and pressure on the government

The Mensheviks decided in March to end their previous estrangement from the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), to try to achieve majorities in the Soviets, lost in October of the previous year, to reconvene the Constituent Assembly and thus legally force the resignation of Lenin”s Government. Unemployment, worsening food shortages and the loss of support produced the electoral victories of the opposition to the Government. The conversion of factory committees and trade unions into state bodies and the impossibility of using them as avenues of protest led the workers to seek alternative organizations to channel their discontent with the situation; the dedication of the Mensheviks to facilitate the formation of these associations, alternatives to the previous ones, increased workers” support for the party. Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries led the movement of alternative workers” organizations (assemblies of plenipotentiary delegates, upolnomóchennye) which emerged during the spring. In this period and until June, the Mensheviks forged a close alliance with the Social Revolutionaries – despite some differences – which even led them to present joint lists in the elections to the soviets, publish newspapers together or form a united opposition to the Bolsheviks.

During the spring, the Menshevik-Social Revolutionary bloc won in nineteen of the thirty provincial capitals of European Russia. In all the regions of the country the elections showed the resurgence of both parties. These successes led to the reaction of the Government, which dissolved several of the Soviets, which, in turn, led the opposition to redouble its efforts to organize among the workers, to clashes between them and the Government and to the introduction of martial law in some cities. The Mensheviks, like the Left Social Revolutionaries (government partners of the Bolsheviks), condemned the dissolution of the Soviets, had opposed the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace and the formation of grain requisitioning gangs in the countryside. In the debates on industry, transport, finance and agrarian policy at the end of May which finally approved the Bolshevik motions, the Mensheviks were against giving unlimited powers to the government commissars – which included the ability to dissolve the Soviets as had already been happening during the spring – in favor of control of the economy but not by the Bolshevik Party, but by the union of government, workers and industrialists; opposed to the trade unions becoming agents of the State; in favor of the regulation of industry, but opposed to this leading to centralism and bureaucratization; in favor of the partial privatization of the banks to stimulate the economy; opposed to forced agrarian requisitions and defended the need for the Government to justify its accounts obligatorily. …

In his appeal to oppose the treaty with the Central Empires, Martov had denounced the lack of knowledge of the terms of the pact and the measures of the Government which had led to military defencelessness and demanded in vain the restoration of the Constituent Assembly, but his stand against the treaty had garnered a mere 276 votes against 724 in favor and 118 abstentions. It had been precisely the peace treaty with the empires which had hardened the Menshevik position, had put an end to their absence from the institutions and had led to attempts to dispute with the Bolsheviks the control of the Soviets, trade unions, factory committees… The Mensheviks tried at the same time to form workers” associations free from the control of the Government.

Their return to the VTsIK came, however, with four delegates, a number that did not reflect the party”s strength in the Soviets and which was less than that offered by the Bolsheviks in December 1917. The Mensheviks had to wait for the next congress to try to increase their delegation, which the Bolsheviks admitted in an attempt to gain legitimacy after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly.

In mid-May, a wave of workers” protests took place in Petrograd, which the Bolsheviks repressed. For them, these actions were provocations of the Mensheviks and reinforced their conviction of the need to eliminate the Menshevik and social-revolutionary agitators. The discontent reached not only the workers of the former capital, militarily not very dangerous due to their lack of weapons, but also the military units in the area, including the fleet, which endangered their use by the Government to dissolve the workers” protests. At the Kronstadt naval base, a former Bolshevik center, the elections to the soviet reduced the number of Bolshevik delegates from 131 to 53. At the end of May, however, fearful that the protests would degenerate into an uprising that would crush the Cheka or that forcibly wresting power from the Bolsheviks would only serve to facilitate the emergence of a reactionary government, the Mensheviks called off the protests, despite failing to win concessions from the Bolsheviks or the peaceful overthrow of the latter by popular pressure. Increasingly, the Bolsheviks saw the Mensheviks as critics of their government who should be eliminated from the institutions since they endangered with their denunciations and opposition the image of their own party as the legitimate representative of the workers. The permanence of the Bolshevik Party in power was identified with the maintenance of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which made inevitable the attack on the political opposition that could put it at risk.

In order to clarify the position of the party on various questions (the advisability or not of continuing legal opposition to the Bolsheviks in the Soviets, support for armed insurrections against the Government, position in the face of foreign armed intervention) the Central Committee called a national party conference on May 20 in the capital. The conference succeeded in maintaining unity between internationalists and defensists, but did not eliminate the serious tensions between them. Despite the desire of the defensists to abandon the Soviets, the motion to this effect was rejected by the delegates who, however, approved a motion in which they were sharply criticized as bureaucratic bodies in the hands of the Bolsheviks. Again, the party was divided between those more interested in participating in national politics through the Soviets and those who defended more strongly the need to restore the local dumas and the Constituent Assembly. On the advisability of possible pacts with kadets or other bourgeois forces and with the Allies, the factions were once again divided between internationalists – opposed – and defensists – fundamentally favorable. Finally, the conference approved the internationalist motions on these two issues.

At the beginning of June, the opposition formed by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries was very strong in the Soviets, trade unions and other organizations and seemed to have a remarkable chance of winning a majority at the next Fifth Congress of the Soviets.

Expulsion from the Central Executive Committee and repression

The summer saw a chaotic situation of repression of the opposition, with a series of arrests, shootings, strikes and demonstrations intermingled. At the beginning of the summer, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had already been expelled from several provincial Soviets. The growth of the opposition, the growing differences between Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries and the intention of the former to win the majority of delegates to the forthcoming Fifth Congress of the Soviets led the latter to expel the Mensheviks from the VTsIK on June 14, 1918. A few days before his expulsion, Fyodor Dan had opposed the formation of the “Committees of Poor Peasants” which were to be in charge of facilitating the collection of grain in agriculture, predicting that it would cause a bloodbath due to clashes between peasants. He also accused the Bolsheviks of using them to dissolve the peasant soviets, in which they were losing their majority. The growing closeness between left social revolutionaries and Mensheviks indicated the possible formation of a common opposition, which the Bolsheviks wished to avoid.

After long internal discussions among the Bolshevik leaders, during the session of the VTsIK on June 14, which began at ten o”clock in the evening, the expulsion of Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries from it was announced, endorsing those already carried out in the cities but not demanding, but only advising, their expulsion from the other Soviets. In many of the cities where the Mensheviks had obtained a majority in the elections to the Soviets, the news of the expulsion led to the radicalization of the workers and the extension of strikes in protest against the measure. The government reacted by imposing martial law, increasing arrests and shooting certain workers. Attempts to protest through a general strike in early July were met with redoubled Cheka repression and general hardship, which reduced the number of workers in Petrograd from 365,000 in January to 118,000 in October, rendering the strike ineffective. The expulsion of the Mensheviks from the VTsIK, the manipulation of the voting for the congress in Petrograd and the arrests of the workers” assemblies were the first measures against the opposition, which in July included the dissolution of the soviets controlled by the opposition -replaced by Bolshevik executive committees or Cheka detachments-, the abolition of the peasant soviets, replaced by the “poor peasants” committees”, the expulsion of the opposition from the institutions and other organizations, the prohibition of strikes or the closure of the opposition press. Some of the opposition leaders were arrested and some of them were executed.

After a temporary ban in July, all the non-Bolshevik press was banned definitively in August, with the exception of a handful of publications, one of them Menshevik. Also during the summer, from mid-June, Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries put an end to their former alliance. While the former tried to remain neutral in the civil war, the latter forcibly opposed Lenin”s government. They also disagreed on the attitude to foreign intervention, the advisability of cooperating with the Kadets, the role of the Soviets or the clandestine activities to be carried out. The Central Committee decided not to support the Yaroslavl and Izhevsk uprisings of July and August and expelled the local leaders who had supported them.

On August 14, a detachment of Red Guards appeared in the offices of the Central Committee, seizing all the party”s material and archives. By then several of its members had been arrested and Martov and Dan were in hiding. In mid-autumn, the height of the repression of the Mensheviks came, who had to go underground, persecuted by the Cheka. The party was not officially banned, but the Cheka prevented its operation. At the end of the year, the repression eased, but the party remained in a situation of semi-legality. In December, the Mensheviks separated from their Georgian co-religionists, condemning their separatism and their appeal to the Allies. Only in the Democratic Republic of Georgia had Menshevism achieved broad support among the intelligentsia, the workers and the peasants, governing the independent country between 1918 and 1921.

Meanwhile, the divisions between the different currents had been exacerbated by the emergence of the Komuch and later of the Omsk Directory. With the former the Menshevik central committee maintained complicated relations despite theoretically supporting it as the heir of the Constituent Assembly. The Mensheviks, active in the Soviets and in the workers” organizations, were generally opposed to the intensification of the civil war and the terror unleashed in the name of the Komuch, often by counterrevolutionary bands supposedly subject to its authority. The Mensheviks also feared that the Komuch would serve the counterrevolutionary forces as a mere democratic façade to defeat the Bolsheviks, to then also wipe out the remaining socialists and implement a monarchical system. The latter”s departure from the legislation hastily passed in the only session of the assembly and its composition caused the central committee to reject it, unlike the Menshevik regional organization, which offered its support, to the chagrin of the central committee. Kolchak”s coup which put an end to the Directory seemed to confirm the Mensheviks” fears of counter-revolution and to justify not actively opposing the Moscow Government. The rise of Denikin and Kolchak confirmed Martov”s fears that the uprisings favored by the Czechoslovak rebellion and the intervention of the Entente would lead to reaction.

By the end of August, the central committee controlled by Martov had lost control of the party, both because of the repression against the party and because of the difficulty of communication with the provinces due to the war. The party began to break up into its regional groupings, which held positions often contrary to those of the central committee.

The intensification of the civil war and the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War led the Mensheviks to approach the Bolsheviks as representatives of the working class against the counterrevolution, trying at the same time to correct what they considered their defects. The defeat in the civil war of the Bolsheviks did not seem to augur a transfer of power to the socialists or to a social-liberal coalition, but to the military reaction of Kolchak. The outbreak of the November Revolution in Germany made them think that the world revolution would become centered in this country and that this would positively influence the Bolsheviks. Its beginning, however, accentuated the rapprochement of a part of the party to the Bolsheviks and the loss of members in favor of the latter. The failure of the German revolution reinforced the turn to the left of the Mensheviks.

In September and October 1918, the Central Committee tried to break with the defensist current in the party, which had been greatly weakened after Denikin and Kolchak opposed forming an anti-Bolshevik alliance as the latter had intended. At the party conference in December, the majority supported Martov and Dan, condemned the actions of the Volga-Urals grouping and other local groupings which had violated the directives of the central committee. Part of the defensist faction then left the party and formed an underground grouping which survived until 1921. The conference adopted a new position, in which the party accepted the political system based on the Soviets, abandoned the demand to restore the Constituent Assembly and condemned the anti-Bolshevik governments supported by foreign forces; the Mensheviks became a legal opposition to the Bolsheviks in the Soviet system which the latter controlled, despite the slim hopes of tolerance. The conference condemned more harshly than before the foreign military intervention, which no longer supported the Social Revolutionaries, but the “White” armies, but opposed the forced incorporation into the state of the territories which had become independent during the civil war.

Increasingly closer to the Bolsheviks, they accepted the October Revolution at their March 1920 party conference and rejected the resurrection of the Second International, although they refused to join the Third, adhering in February 1921 to the Second and Middle International which, lacking support, dissolved two years later. The danger of the counterrevolutionary forces winning the civil war in the summer of 1919 led the Bolsheviks to restore some of the characteristics of the original Soviet model to win the support of Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, which they obtained. After Kolchak”s defeat, in which they played a leading role, they again suffered Bolshevik repression. Although the party was not officially banned and could theoretically stand for election to the Soviets, the Cheka arrested its candidates.

Its economic program, opposed to “war communism” which handed over control of the economy to the Government, was adopted at the end of the civil war. At the same time the party was dismantled: hundreds of members, including the central committee, were arrested. After a hunger strike at the beginning of 1922, the Soviet Government allowed ten prominent leaders (among them Dan) to emigrate. Many others, demoralized, offered their services to the Government and reached high positions in the State, such as Georgy Chicherin (People”s Commissar for Foreign Affairs) or Andrei Vyshinski (General Prosecutor and later People”s Commissar for Foreign Affairs).

Although some groupings continued to exist until the early 1930s in the USSR, from 1922 onwards Menshevism ceased to be a mass organization, ceasing to stand for election because of arrests. The leaders who remained in the Soviet Union were executed after the trials of 1930 and 1931 or immediately after the German invasion of 1941.

The Menshevik party was banned after the Kronstadt Rebellion in early 1921; it had played a prominent role in the Petrograd protests that took place immediately prior to the naval base uprising. The likelihood that the Mensheviks would approve Lenin”s New Economic Policy which had just been voted at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party and use it as justification for their rejection of the October Revolution – the situation in Russia prevented the passage to socialism and forced the Bolsheviks to allow a certain amount of capitalism – posed a danger to government prestige.

Some of its members emigrated and collaborated in the publication of the newspaper The Socialist Messenger, founded by Martov. Most of the emigrants concentrated at first in Berlin. After Hitler”s rise, they moved to Paris and, in the early 1940s, to the United States. The Menshevik newspaper ceased publication in 1965.

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