Bolshevism and Menshevism¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter dissects the political trajectory of the Mensheviks at the Fourth (Unity) Congress of the RSDLP in Stockholm, arguing that their ascendancy at the gathering marked a decisive rightward shift away from revolutionary struggle toward reformist parliamentarism and class collaboration. The Mensheviks’ opposition to arming the masses and their abandonment of the semi-boycott of the Duma are presented as symptomatic of a deeper strategic realignment. Trotsky is cited to underscore that the Mensheviks now prioritised constitutional gains and liberal support over revolutionary confrontation. Axelrod’s admission that Menshevik activists had initially backed the boycott but now saw it as ceding ground to rival parties is treated as a revealing instance of being right for the wrong reasons: the Mensheviks’ underlying drive was a permanent accommodation with the Cadets. In contrast, the Bolsheviks sought to exploit conflict between the Duma and the autocracy to deepen the revolutionary crisis, while relentlessly criticising the Cadets and winning over peasant Trudovik deputies.
The chapter also identifies an ultra-left deviation within Bolshevism itself: the opposition to forming a Social Democratic parliamentary fraction, which the author characterises as anti-parliamentary cretinism—the mirror image of Menshevik legalistic illusions. Lenin is shown defending party unity against accusations of sectarianism, loyally accepting a minority position on the Central Committee dominated by Mensheviks, in pointed contrast to the Martovites’ behaviour at the Second Congress. The Congress did achieve organisational consolidation: Lenin’s draft of the first paragraph of the Party Rules was adopted, democratic centralism accepted as self-evident, and the RSDLP strengthened by amalgamation with Polish, Latvian, and Bundist organisations. Membership figures cited by Lenin and the liberal newspaper Tovarishch reached over 100,000.
Yet the chapter insists these numbers conceal a deeper crisis. The December 1905 defeat had been a turning point: exhaustion bred apathy and pessimism among the masses. Trotsky is again invoked to argue that while the party continued to grow in membership, its influence over the working class was declining—a hundred Social Democrats could no longer lead as many workers into the streets as ten had done the year before. Lenin’s hopes for an early revolutionary recovery are thus implicitly criticised as out of step with reality. The polemical thrust is directed against both Menshevik reformism and the incipient ultra-leftism within Bolshevism, while the narrative arc traces the tension between organisational unity and strategic divergence on the eve of reaction.