Quotes About Mensheviks

Although these operations (known among the revolutionaries as "exes") aroused much opposition in the party, especially from the Mensheviks, Lenin approved and relied heavily upon them as a source of funds to finance political activity. With his connivance they continued in the aftermath of 1905 despite the fact that a Menshevik-sponsored resolution forbidding them was passed at the party's Fourth Congress—the so-called Unity Congress—held in Stockholm in 1906.

The Mensheviks emerged from the Revolution of 1905 as the dominant Social Democratic faction in Georgia.

One factor in their success was the vigor with which they adopted the general Menshevik-favored tactic of participating in the elections for the first Duma. The Bolsheviks, meeting for a conference in the Finnish town of Tammerfors in December 1905, decided (over Lenin's objections) to boycott these elections.

Neither the Mensheviks nor the SRs made any protest at this clearly repressive political action—

Predictably, Lenin's socialist opponents—Bundists, Latvian Social Democrats, Mensheviks—denounced the Prague conference for the illegitimate maneuver that it was. Equally predictably, however, their own efforts to answer with their own Party Congress in August 1912 disintegrated into irreconcilable factionalism.

Lenin refused to accept the result and announced the formation of a faction, which he called Bolsheviks (majoritarians) because he had won a majority on other, secondary questions. Martov's majority, incredibly, allowed itself to become known as Mensheviks (minoritarians).

the congress had been dominated by Mensheviks, many of whom were Jews. "It wouldn't hurt," he wrote in the report, recalling another Bolshevik's remarks at the congress, "for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the party.

But the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks - the proposal of Irakli Tsereteli, the outstanding Menshevik intellect and orator, recently returned from Siberian exile and now in charge of the Petrograd Soviet.

[To the Mensheviks:] You are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of history!

It was necessary that throughout this mass should be scattered workers who had thought over the experience of 1905, criticised the constitutional illusions of the liberals and Mensheviks, assimilated the perspectives of the revolution, meditated hundreds of times about the question of the army, watched attentively what was going on in its midst-workers capable of making revolutionary inferences from what they observed and communicating them to others.

If] we were to make "recognition of the dictatorship [of the proletariat]" a condition of trade union membership, we should be committing a folly, we should be damaging our influence over the masses, we should be helping the Mensheviks. For the whole task of the Communists is to be able to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them…