Mensheviks

The name comes from the Russian word for 'minority': at the party's Second Congress in 1903 the supporters of Julius Martov lost the key votes to Lenin. The Mensheviks wanted a broad mass party and believed that Russia first faced a bourgeois revolution. From 1912 they operated as a separate party.

After the February Revolution Mensheviks such as Nikolay Chkheidze and Irakli Tsereteli led the Petrograd Soviet together with the Socialist Revolutionaries. They backed so-called revolutionary defencism, defending the country while seeking a peace without annexations, and from May 1917 sat in the Provisional Government. They condemned the October coup, and in the years that followed the Bolsheviks pushed them to the margins and broke them with repression.