ABSTRACT
At the news of "Bloody Sunday", Iskra proclaimed that the Russian proletariat, not only in St. Petersburg but throughout the land, had served a "short-term ultimatum on the house of the Romanovs". The event proved that neither a revolutionary populace nor a popular uprising was a figment of Social Democratic imagination. In contemporary Russia two opposing forces had been contending for power: Tsarism against "bourgeois liberalism and raznochinnaia democracy, fighters for culture and citizenhood". Russia was on the threshold of bourgeois democracy. It would be a better sort of bourgeois democracy, not because the Russian middle class was better than that of the West, but because the Russian proletariat was more advanced by far than the Western proletariat had been at the time of the classic bourgeois revolutions. In the autumn of 1905 Martov believed that events had fully justified Menshevik tactics. The Mensheviks were thought to be in a position to carry to the end the "bourgeois revolution".
