Page:Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky - The Aims of the Bolsheviki (1919).djvu/6

 At first this division did not assume very clear forms, and it was only as a result of a two years' test of live social revolutionary activity that the rôle of the Right and Left S.D.'s became clear. This happened in 1903, at the second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party. There the two sections definitely separated, the majority of the Congress forming the Bolsheviki, headed by Lenin, and the minority, the Mensheviki, headed by Martov. Henceforth the struggle between these sections went on unceasingly in connection with a whole series of highly-important questions of theory and practice in the revolutionary movement of the working masses, and especially that of Russia.

The Bolsheviki and the Mensheviki disagreed on the following questions:—

Who are the motive power of the revolution? The Bolsheviki asserted that, apart from the revolutionary vanguard—the industrial proletariat—the motive power in the struggie for the political and economic freedom of the whole people is not the upper and middle bourgeoisie, but solely the democracy, i.e., the poorest peasantry and the strata of the lower bourgeoisie, akin to it. They held that only the working class and their "fellow travellers" of the lower bourgeoisie had an interest in establishing the people's power in Russia. This interest was not shared by the upper and middle strata of the bourgeoisie, which even under the Czarist régime had received their share of power in the shape of admittance to posts in the administration of the State, of voting rights for the Imperial Duma, and for the Councils of the Empire, and in local social work in the Zemstvos ("county councils") and municipalities. And this, too, at a time when the masses were fleeced