The Menshevik and Bolshevik factions had different social and ethnic compositions. Both attracted a disproportionate number of
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
