Lenin viewed with skepticism the emergence of the soviets, because they were conceived as “non-partisan” workers’ organizations and, as such, outside the control of the political parties: given his belief in the accommodationist drift of the working class, the soviets did not strike him and his followers as dependable.69 At the time of its formation, some Petrograd Bolsheviks urged the workers to boycott the Soviet on the grounds that granting a workers’ organization primacy over the Social-Democratic Party would mean “subordinating consciousness to spontaneity”70—in other words, elevating the workers above the intelligentsia. Lenin himself was more flexible, although he could never quite make up his mind about the soviets’ function and utility. In the end, after 1906, he decided that they could be of use but only as helpmates of the “revolutionary army.” They were essential to the revolution (“insurrection”) but had no utility in and of themselves.71 He also rejected the soviets as organs of self-rule—their function was to serve as “instruments” of an insurrection carried out by disciplined armed detachments.
With the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution, Lenin decided that the time had come to distance himself from the main body of the party and openly form his own organization. In April 1905, he convened in London an unauthorized “Third Congress” of the Social-Democratic Party; all the delegates (thirty-eight in number) were members of his faction. According to Krupskaia:
At the Third Congress, there were no workers—at any rate, there was not one remotely noticeable worker. But there were at the congress many “committee men.” Whoever ignores this structure of the Third Congress will not understand much in its minutes.72
In such a friendly gathering, Lenin had no difficulty gaining approval of all his resolutions, which the legitimate Social-Democratic Labor Party—as evidenced by its actions the following year in Stockholm—would have rejected. The “Third Congress” marked the beginning of the formal split in the SD Party, which would be consummated in 1912.
Having returned to Russia in early November 1905, Lenin encouraged the Moscow uprising of the next month, but as soon as the shooting began he made himself scarce. The day after the barricades had gone up in Moscow (December 10, 1905), he and Krupskaia sought refuge in Finland. They returned only on December 17, after the uprising had been crushed.
In April 1906, the two branches of Russian Social-Democracy made a halfhearted attempt at reunification at a congress held in Stockholm. Here Lenin tried and failed to gain a majority on the Central Committee. He also suffered defeat on a number of practical issues: the congress condemned the creation of armed detachments and the idea of an armed insurrection, and rejected his agrarian program. Undaunted, Lenin formed, in secret from the Mensheviks, an illegal and clandestine “Central Committee” (a successor to the “Bureau”) under his personal direction. Apparently composed at first of three members, it expanded in 1907 to fifteen.73
During and immediately after the revolutionary year of 1905, the ranks of Social-Democracy increased manifold, with tens of thousands of new adherents signing up, a high proportion of them intellectuals. By this time, the two factions acquired a distinct complexion.74 The Bolsheviks in 1905 are estimated to have had 8,400 followers, roughly the same number as the Mensheviks and the Bundists. The Stockholm congress of the SD Party, held in April 1906, is said to have represented 31,000 members, 18,000 of them Mensheviks and 13,000 Bolsheviks. In 1907, the party had grown to 84,300 members—approximately equal to the membership of the Constitutional-Democratic Party—of whom 46,100 were Bolsheviks and 38,200 Mensheviks; affiliated were 25,700 Polish Social-Democrats, 25,500 Bundists, and 13,000 Latvian SDs. This marked the crest of the wave: in 1908 desertions began and in 1910 by Trotsky’s estimate, the membership of the Russian Social-Democratic Party dwindled to 10,000 or fewer.75
The Menshevik and Bolshevik factions had different social and ethnic compositions. Both attracted a disproportionate number of dvoriane, or gentry—20 percent compared to a 1.7 percent share of dvoriane in the population at large (the Bolsheviks rather more, with 22 percent; the Mensheviks fewer, with 19 percent). The Bolsheviks had in their ranks a considerably higher proportion of peasants: 38 percent of their membership came from this group, compared with 26 percent in Menshevik ranks.76 These were not farming peasants, who followed the Socialists-Revolutionaries, but uprooted, déclassé peasants who had moved to the city in search of work. This socially transitional element was to supply numerous cadres to the Bolshevik Party and exert much influence on its mentality. The Mensheviks attracted more lower-class urban inhabitants (meshchane), skilled workers (e.g., printers and railroad employees), as well as intellectuals and professional people.
As concerns the ethnic composition of the two factions, the Bolsheviks were predominantly Great Russian, whereas the Mensheviks attracted mostly non-Russians, especially Georgians and Jews. At the SD Second Congress, Lenin’s support came principally from delegates sent by the central—that is, Great Russian—provinces. At the Fifth Congress (1907), nearly four-fifths (78.3 percent) of the Bolsheviks were Great Russian, compared with one-third (34 percent) of the Mensheviks. Approximately 10 percent of the Bolsheviks were Jewish; their proportion in Menshevik ranks was twice as high.*77
The Bolshevik Party, in its formative years, may thus be characterized as follows: (1) heavily rural in composition, its rank and file having been drawn “to a considerable extent from men born in and still having connections with the countryside,” and (2) “overwhelmingly Great Russian” and based on regions inhabited by Great Russians.78 Its social and cultural roots, in other words, were among groups and in areas with the oldest traditions of serfdom.
But the two factions also shared certain features, of which the most important was their tenuous relationship with industrial labor, the social group that they claimed to represent. Since the emergence of Social-Democracy in Russia in the 1880s, the workers treated the socialist intelligentsia with ambivalence. The unskilled and semi-skilled workers shunned them altogether, because they viewed intellectuals as gentlemen (“white hands”) who used them to settle private scores with the Tsar. They remained immune to the influence of the Social-Democratic Party. The better-educated, more skilled and politically conscious workers often regarded the Social-Democrats as friends and supporters, without being prepared to be led by them: as a rule, they preferred trade unionism to party politics.79 As a consequence, the number of workers in Social-Democratic organizations remained minuscule. Martov estimates that in the first half of 1905, when the Revolution was already well underway, the Mensheviks had in Petrograd some 1,200 to 1,500 active worker supporters and the Bolsheviks “several hundred”—and this in the Empire’s most industrialized city with over 200,000 industrial workers.80 At the end of 1905, the two factions had between them in St. Petersburg a total of 3,000 members.81 In effect, therefore, both the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions were organizations of intellectuals. Martov’s observations on this subject, published in 1914, anticipate the situation which would emerge after the February Revolution:
In such cities as Petersburg, where in the course of 1905 it had become actually possible to engage in active work on a broad arena, … in the party organization there remained only worker “professionals,” who carried out central organizational functions, and labor youths, who enrolled in party circles for the purpose of self-development. The politically more mature worker element remained formally outside the organization or was only counted as belonging to it, which had the most deleterious effect on the relations of the organization and its centers with the masses. At the same time, the mass influx of the intelligentsia into the party, given the greater suitability of its organizational forms to the intelligentsia’s conditions of life (more leisure and the possibility of devoting much time to “conspiracy,” residence in the central quarters of the city, more favorable to eluding surveillance), resulted in all the higher cells of the [Social-Democratic] organization … being filled by the intelligentsia, which, in turn, led to their psychological isolation from the mass movement. Hence, the unending conflicts and friction between the “centers” and the “periphery” and the mounting antagonism between workers and the intelligentsia …82