Correct Answer - Option 2 : Minority
The Mensheviks were a Russian revolutionary party that followed the theories of Karl Marx.
- Like the Bolsheviks, they began as part of the Social Democratic Labour Party or SDs.
- The Mensheviks formed after the party split in 1903 over issues of membership and organisation.
Split among Mensheviks and Bolsheviks:
- In 1898, Russian Marxists had organized the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, this was illegal in tsarist Russia itself, as were all political parties.
- A congress was organized but had only nine socialist attendees at most, and these were quickly arrested.
- In 1903, the Party held a second congress to debate events and actions with just over fifty people.
- Here, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) argued for a party composed only of professional revolutionaries, to give the movement a core of experts rather than a mass of amateurs.
- He was opposed by a faction led by Julius or L. Martov (two pseudonyms of Yuly Osipovich Tsederbaum 1873–1923) who wanted a model of mass membership like other, western European social-democratic parties.
- The result was a division between the two camps.
- Lenin and his supporters gained a majority on the central committee and, even though it was only a temporary majority and his faction was firmly in the minority, they took for themselves the name Bolshevik, meaning ‘Those of the Majority.'
- Their opponents, the faction led by Martov, thus became known as Mensheviks, ‘Those of the Minority,’ despite being the overall larger faction.
- This split was not initially seen as either a problem or a permanent division, although it puzzled grassroots socialists in Russia.
- Almost from the start, the split was over being for or against Lenin, and the politics formed around this.
Thus, we can conclude that in 1903 Mensheviks were in Minority.
