ABSTRACT
The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) in 1903 had witnessed the division of the Party into two factions, the Bolshevik (the ‘majoritarian’) and the Menshevik (the ‘minoritarian’). The Mensheviks opposed the model of party organisation proposed by Lenin. Rejecting his conclusions that a highly centralised and disciplined conspiratorial party was necessary to further the cause of revolution in Russia, they espoused the creation of a mass democratic party, embracing all who broadly shared the Party’s objectives. Before 1917 they also repeatedly argued that the forthcoming revolution in Russia would be bourgeois-democratic, not socialist (Lenin himself, as we saw in Chapter 3, had argued similarly). This revolution would result in democratic transformation of the country and its industrial development along capitalist lines. The task of the Mensheviks was to defend democracy and the rights of the workers, while organising them to be prepared to strike for power when the preconditions for socialist revolution finally matured. On no account, as Leopold Haimson has affirmed, should they seek to seize, or even share, power at this first stage of the Revolution (Haimson 1974:xviii). Consistent with this strategy, the majority of Mensheviks were prepared to support the Provisional Government, from a distance, in so far as it acted to further the democratisation of Russia (see Document 3.9). Moreover, the February Revolution also served to heal (temporarily) the split that had emerged in Menshevik ranks during World War I. The Internationalists, whose views were most cogently articulated by Iulii Martov, refused to support Russia’s, or any other country’s, participation in the war. Instead, they advocated the speedy negotiation of a democratic peace, without annexations and indemnities. On the other hand, the Defencists, whose opinions were voiced by Aleksandr Potresov and even more extremely by Georgii Plekhanov, believed that workers and socialists had a duty to defend Russia from German aggression. The fall of the autocracy led many former Internationalists, most prominently Fedor Dan and Irakli Tsereteli, to adopt the strategy known as ‘revolutionary defencism’. Now that Russia was a democratic state, socialists legitimately could countenance a defensive war against reactionary German imperialism while at the same time pressuring the Provisional Government to begin negotiations to conclude a democratic peace (Brovkin 1987:3–4). However, this unity was to be short-lived. The crisis of 20–1 April provoked by Miliukov’s note to the Allies (see Document 4.4) compelled the Revolutionary Defencist majority, reluctantly, to enter the First Coalition (see Document 4.7). Solomon Shvarts defended this decision at a conference of the Petrograd Mensheviks that began on 3 May.
