It was only at the Second Party Congress, which met in Brussels the following year, that the implications of Lenin’s catechism for the party began to emerge. The result was a split in the party and the formation of two distinct Social Democratic factions — the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The immediate cause of the split may seem really quite trivial. Even those inside the party did not at first realize the historic importance which it would later come to assume. It arose over the precise wording of Article One of the Party Statute, in which party membership was defined. Lenin wanted membership limited to those who participated in one of the party’s organizations; whereas Martov, while recognizing the need for a nucleus of disciplined activists, wanted anyone who recognized the Party Programme and was willing to obey its leadership to be admitted. Beneath the surface of this semantic dispute lay two opposing views of the party’s role. On the one hand, Lenin was proposing a centralized and conspiratorial party of professional revolutionaries in the tradition of the People’s Will. He had a profound mistrust of the revolutionary potential of the masses, who he believed, without the leadership of an élite party vanguard, would inevitably become diverted by the bread-and-butter issues of Economism. ‘Socialist consciousness’, he had written in What Is To Be Done?, ‘cannot exist among the workers. This can be introduced only from without.’ This mistrust of democracy was to form the basis of Lenin’s centralist approach to the trade unions, the soviets and all the other mass-based organizations after 1917. The masses should in his view be no more than instruments of the party. This was pointed out by Lenin’s critics, who warned that such a centralized party would lead to dictatorship. Socialism, in their view, was unattainable without democracy, which necessitated a broad-based party arising directly from the culture and the consciousness of the working class. Martov’s view on Article One was at first upheld by 28 votes to 23. But two factions which supported it — the 5 Bundist delegates (who had been denied their demand for autonomy within the party) followed by the 2 Economists (who had been defeated by the Iskra-ites) — then walked out of the Congress, leaving Lenin with a slender majority. It was on this basis that his faction was christened the ‘Bolsheviks’ (‘Majoritarians’) and their opponents the ‘Mensheviks’ (‘Minoritarians’). With hindsight it is clear that the Mensheviks were very foolish to allow the adoption of these names. It saddled them with the permanent image of a minority party, which was to be an important disadvantage in their rivalry with the Bolsheviks.
Lenin seized this opportunity to assert his control of the Central Committee and its organ, Iskra, by ejecting the three ‘Menshevik’ veterans — Zasulich, Axelrod and Potresov — from its editorial board. Lenin’s conspiratorial methods hardened the divide between the two factions. Their clash was at first much more to do with personalities, style and emotions than with the articulation of distinctive ideologies. The Mensheviks were outraged by Lenin’s shoddy treatment of the three ousted editors — he had called them Iskra’s ‘least productive members’ — and in solidarity with them Martov now refused to serve with Lenin and Plekhanov on the new editorial board. They accused Lenin of trying to become the dictator of the party — one talked of his needing to wield a ‘baton’ like the one used by army commanders to instil discipline in the ranks — and set themselves up as the defenders of democracy in the party. Lenin’s own intransigence, his refusal to patch up his differences with the Mensheviks (differences which, by his own admission, were ‘in substance … very unimportant’), and his readiness, once provoked, to admit to his belief that there had to be a dictator of the party to discipline the ‘wavering elements in our midst’, merely heightened the emotional tensions. The meeting broke down in petty squabbles, with each side accusing the other of having ‘started it’, or of having ‘betrayed’ the other. People took sides on the basis of hurt feelings and outraged sensibilities and established bonds of loyalty. Lydia Dan recalls that she took Martov’s side not so much because she thought that he was right but because:
I felt that I had to support him. And many others felt that way. Martov was poorly suited to be a leader. But he had an inexhaustible charm that attracted people. It was frequently difficult to account for why they followed him. He himself said, ‘I have the nasty privilege of being liked by people.’ And, naturally, if something like a schism occurred, Martov would be noble, Martov would be honourable, while Lenin … well, Lenin’s influence was enormous, but still … For my own part, it was very tragic to have to say that all my sympathies for Lenin (which were considerable) were based upon misunderstanding.32
For several years the incipient political differences between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks continued to be masked by personal factors. No doubt it was in part because the two factions all lived together — sometimes literally — in small exile communities, so that their arguments over party dogma often became entangled in squabbles over money and lovers. But Lenin’s personality was the crucial issue. Bolshevism was defined by a personal pledge of loyalty to him; and Menshevism, though to a lesser extent, by opposition to him. Valentinov, on his arrival in Geneva in 1904, was shocked by the ‘atmosphere of worship [of Lenin] which people calling themselves Bolsheviks had created’ there. Lenin reinforced this divide by his violent attack on the Mensheviks in his pamphlet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904). He now called them ‘traitors’ to the Marxist cause. None of his Bolshevik lieutenants was even allowed to talk to any of the Menshevik leaders without gaining his prior approval.33
Only very slowly, during and after 1905, were the differences between the two factions spelled out in political terms. In fact for a long time (right up until 1918) the rank and file Social Democrats, particularly on the Menshevik side, sought to stitch the party together again. This was especially so in the provinces, where the party’s forces were simply too small to afford such factional disputes. Here they continued to work together in united SD organizations. But gradually, as the party was forced to confront the dilemmas of real politics, during the 1905 Revolution and then in the Duma period, so its two factions demarcated themselves both in terms of their different ideologies, their strategies and tactics, and in terms of their ever more diverse political styles and cultures.
Menshevism remained a loose movement — high on morals, low on discipline. There was no real Menshevik leader, in the sense that the Bolsheviks had one, and indeed it was a part of Menshevik ideology to deny the need for one. Only slowly and reluctantly were the Mensheviks dragged towards the type of formal party structure which their rivals had from the start. Their spirit remained that of the friendly and informal circles (kruzhki) of the 1890s, what Lenin mocked as ‘the loose Oblomov gowns and slippers’ of the movement’s salad days. But the Mensheviks were genuinely more democratic, both in their policies and in their composition, than the Bolsheviks. They tended to attract a broader range of people — more non-Russians, especially Jews and Georgians, more diverse types of workers, petty merchants and members of the intelligentsia — whereas the followers of the Bolsheviks tended to come from a narrower range (the vast majority were Great Russian workers and uprooted peasants). This broader social base may partly explain the Mensheviks’ inclination towards compromise and conciliation with the liberal bourgeoisie. This was certainly the main distinction between them and the Bolsheviks, who, under Lenin’s guidance, became increasingly intransigent in their opposition to democracy. Yet this demarcation — much as it may have been linked with social differences — was essentially an ethical one. The Mensheviks were democrats by instinct, and their actions as revolutionaries were always held back by the moral scruples which this entailed. This was not true of the Bolsheviks. They were simpler and younger men, militant peasant-workers like Kanatchikov; doers rather than thinkers. They were attracted by Lenin’s discipline and firm leadership of the party, by his simple slogans, and by his belief in immediate action to bring down the tsarist regime rather than waiting, as the Mensheviks advised, for it to be eroded by the development of capitalism. This, above all, was what Lenin offered them: the idea that something could be done.