Mensheviks

Mensheviks, name for the position of the minority group in the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party-opposition to the Bolsheviks, the majority group led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Unlike Lenin, the Menshevik theoretician Georgi Plekhanov favored mass membership and believed a spell of bourgeois rule must precede communism. Led by L. Martov (Yuly Osiporich Tsederbaum), the Mensheviks emerged in 1903, backed Aleksandr Feodorovich Kerensky's short-lived government (1917), and opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power. By 1921 they had been eliminated.

See also: Bolsheviks; Russian Revolution.