Скачать с ютуб 17th November 1903: The Bolshevik-Menshevik split within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party в хорошем качестве

17th November 1903: The Bolshevik-Menshevik split within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

The RSDLP was a Russian Marxist group that was established in 1898 to oppose the revolutionary populism that fuelled the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Drawing on the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the RSDLP sought to achieve revolution through the actions of the industrial working class despite the fact that this accounted for barely 3% of the population at the turn of the century. The party was illegal in Russia, and the nine delegates of the first Party Congress in 1898 were arrested by the Imperial Russian Police. Consequently the 57 delegates of the Second Party Congress that began in July 1903 initially met in Brussels, but soon moved to London due to concerns over attention from the Belgian authorities. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, had laid out his vision for the party’s revolution in the book What Is To Be Done? He called for a dedicated revolutionary leadership to keep the workers focused on achieving the transition to a socialist state. In contrast Julius Martov was willing to adopt what Lenin referred to as a ‘soft’ approach with a looser and more democratic organisation, even going as far as to work with Russian liberals in order to achieve social change. On 17 November these disagreements bubbled over into a vote over the editorial board of the party newspaper, Iskra. The Bolsheviks (from the Russian bolshinstvo for ‘majority’) secured the largest number of votes while the Mensheviks were in the minority. The split soon became permanent, although the Bolsheviks actually remained the smaller of the two factions in terms of membership until the Russian Revolution in 1917.