Leon Trotsky at first supported the Mensheviks, but left them in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

The group which supported the establishment of a Central Committee at the 2nd Congress called themselves the Bolsheviks, and the losers ( the minority ) were given the Mensheviks by their own leader, Julius Martov.

In a surprise development, Trotsky and most of the Iskra editors supported Martov and the Mensheviks while Plekhanov supported Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Within the RSDLP, Lenin, Trotsky and Martov advocated various internationalist anti-war positions, while Plekhanov and other social democrats ( both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ) supported the Russian government to some extent.

In the emerging Soviet state there appeared Left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks which were a series of rebellions and uprisings against the Bolsheviks led or supported by left wing groups including Socialist Revolutionaries, Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and anarchists.

Most Mensheviks opposed the war, but a vocal minority supported it in terms of " national defense ".

The right wing of the Menshevik party supported actions against the Bolsheviks, while the left wing, the majority of the Mensheviks at that point, supported the Left in the ensuing Russian Civil War.

He strongly criticized those Mensheviks such as Irakli Tsereteli and Fedor Dan who, now part of Russia's government, supported the war effort.

All of the Soviets in Georgia were firmly controlled by the Mensheviks, who followed the lead of the Petrograd Soviet and supported the Provisional Government.

By then some Mensheviks had already joined Kerensky's Provisional Government and supported government war policy.

Soon, however, the terminology changed to " Bolsheviks " and " Mensheviks ", from the Russian " bolshinstvo " ( majority ) and " menshinstvo " ( minority ), based on the fact that Lenin believed that most of the party stood behind him.

With both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks weakened by splits within their ranks and by Tsarist repression, they were tempted to try to re-unite the party.

The factions permanently broke off relations in January 1912 after the Bolsheviks organised a Bolsheviks-only Prague Party Conference and formally expelled Mensheviks and recallists from the party.

Lenin and his supporters, the Bolsheviks, argued for a smaller but highly organized party while Martov and his supporters, the Mensheviks, argued for a larger and less disciplined party.

In January 1912, the majority of the Bolshevik faction led by Lenin and a few Mensheviks held a conference in Prague and expelled their opponents from the party.

Starting in 1903 a series of splits in the party between two main leaders was escalating, the Bolsheviks ( meaning " majority ") led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Mensheviks ( meaning minority ) led by Julius Martov.

Martov's supporters, who were in the minority in a crucial vote on the question of party membership, came to be called " Mensheviks ", derived from the Russian word меньшинство ( men ' shinstvo, " minority "), whereas Lenin's adherents were known as " Bolsheviks ", from bol ' shinstvo (" majority ").

Despite the outcome of the congress, the following years saw the Mensheviks gathering considerable support among regular Social Democrats and effectively building up a parallel party organization.

In contrast to the Second Congress, the Mensheviks were in the majority from start to finish ; yet, Martov's definition of a party member, which had prevailed at the First Congress, was replaced by Lenin's.

Some Mensheviks left the party after the defeat of 1905 and joined legal opposition organisations.

Along with the other major Russian socialist party, the Socialist Revolutionaries ( эсеры ), the Mensheviks led the emerging network of Soviets, notably the Petrograd Soviet in the capital, throughout most of 1917.

With the collapse of the monarchy, many social democrats viewed previous tactical differences between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks as a thing of the past and a number of local party organizations were merged.

When Bolshevik leaders Lev Kamenev, Joseph Stalin and Matvei Muranov returned to Petrograd from Siberian exile in early March 1917 and assumed the leadership of the Bolshevik party, they began exploring the idea of a complete re-unification of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the national level, which Menshevik leaders were willing to consider.

This split in the party crippled the Mensheviks ' popularity, and they received 3. 2 % of the vote during the Russian Constituent Assembly election in November 1917 compared to the Bolsheviks ' 25 percent and the Socialist Revolutionaries ' 57 percent.

The Mensheviks could not continue basic party practices because the Cheka, the precursor to the GPU, closely monitored them.

Even before the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Struve left it for the Constitutional Democratic party, which promoted ideas of liberalism.

The Bund formally rejoined the RSDLP when all of its faction reunited at the Fourth ( Unification ) Congress in Stockholm in April 1906, with the support of the Mensheviks, but the party ( RSDLP ) remained fractured along ideological and ethnic lines.

After the RSDLP finally split in 1912, the Bund became a federated part of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party ( Menshevik ) ( by this time the Mensheviks had accepted the idea of a federated party organization ).

Moreover, the conference declared the Mensheviks expelled from the party.

The Bolshevik party added '( bolshevik )' to their name to differentiate themselves from the Mensheviks.

The Theses were presented at a party meeting in Petrograd, and subsequently at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the same city.

As the Russian Revolution of 1905 progressed, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and smaller non-Russian social democratic parties operating within the Russian Empire attempted to reunify at the Fourth ( Unification ) Congress of the RSDLP held at Folkets hus, Norra Bantorget in Stockholm, April 1906.

* The Bolshevik faction emerged within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a de facto political bloc separate from the Mensheviks in 1903.

This was a period of heightened tension within the RSDLP and led to numerous frictions between Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

This weakening of the party's position intensified the growing divide within it between supporters of the coalition with the Mensheviks and those inclined toward more resolute, unilateral action.

In 1907 78. 3 % of the Bolsheviks were Russian and 10 % were Jewish ( 34 and 20 % for the Mensheviks ).

The Mensheviks believed that Russian socialism would grow gradually and peacefully and that the tsar ’ s regime should be succeeded by a democratic republic in which the socialists would cooperate with the liberal bourgeois parties.

Trotsky left the Mensheviks in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

* 1903 – The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party splits into two groups ; the Bolsheviks ( Russian for " majority ") and Mensheviks ( Russian for " minority ").

* November 17 – The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party splits into two groups ; the Bolsheviks ( Russian for " majority ") and Mensheviks ( Russian for " minority ").

Kamenev and Central Committee members Joseph Stalin and Matvei Muranov took control of the revived Bolshevik Pravda and moved it to the Right, with Kamenev formulating a policy of conditional support of the newly formed Russian Provisional Government and a reconciliation with the Mensheviks.

However in July 1918 a coalition of Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and Tsarist former officers of the Imperial Russian Army revolted against the Bolshevik rule emanating from Tashkent and established the Ashkhabad Executive Committee.

The Russian Provisional Government was installed immediately following the fall of the Tsar by the Provisional Committee of the State Duma in early March 1917 and received conditional support of the Mensheviks.

The Mensheviks (, ) were a faction of the Russian revolutionary movement that emerged in 1904 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

In 1912, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party went through its final split, with the Bolsheviks constituting the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party ( Bolsheviks ) and the Mensheviks the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party ( Mensheviks ).