Origins and early activities The RSDLP was not the first Russian
Marxist group; the
Emancipation of Labour group had been formed in 1883. The RSDLP was created to oppose the revolutionary populism of the
Narodniks, which was later represented by the
Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs). The RSDLP was formed at
an underground conference in Minsk in March 1898. There were nine delegates: from the
Jewish Labour Bund, and from the
Robochaya Gazeta ("Workers' Newspaper") in
Kiev, both formed a year earlier in 1897; and the
League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in
Saint Petersburg. Some additional social democrats from Moscow and
Yekaterinburg also attended. The RSDLP program was based strictly on the theories of
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels. Specifically, that despite Russia's agrarian nature at the time, the true revolutionary potential lay with the industrial working class. At this time, there were three million Russian industrial workers, just 3% of the population. The RSDLP was illegal for most of its existence. Within a month after the Congress, five of the nine delegates were arrested by the
Okhrana (imperial secret police). Members of the RSDLP became popularly labelled as
esdeki (, singular: ) - from the Russian-language names of the initial letters S () and D () standing for "Social Democrats" (). Before the
2nd Party Congress in 1903, a young intellectual named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (better known by his pseudonym,
Vladimir Lenin) joined the party. In 1902, he had published
What Is To Be Done?, outlining his view of the party's proper task and methodology: to form "the vanguard of the
proletariat". He advocated a disciplined, centralized party of committed activists who would fuse the underground struggle for political freedom with the class struggle of the proletariat.
Internal divisions In 1903, the
2nd Party Congress met in exile in
Brussels to attempt to create a united force. However, after unprecedented attention from the Belgian authorities the Congress moved to London, meeting on 11 August in
Charlotte Street. At the Congress, the party split into two irreconcilable factions on 17 November: the
Bolsheviks (derived from
bolshinstvo—Russian for "majority"), headed by Lenin; and the
Mensheviks (from
menshinstvo—Russian for "minority"), headed by
Julius Martov. Confusingly, the Mensheviks were actually the larger faction, but the names Menshevik and Bolshevik were taken from a vote held at the 1903 Party Congress for the editorial board of the party newspaper,
Iskra (
Spark), with the Bolsheviks being the majority and the Mensheviks being the minority. These were the names used by the factions for the rest of the party Congress and these are the names retained after the split at the 1903 Congress. Lenin's faction later ended up in the minority and remained smaller than the Mensheviks until the
Russian Revolution. On the other hand, Lenin proposed a stricter definition that a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was "one who recognizes the Party's program and supports it by material means and by personal participation in one of the Party's organizations". In the years of Tsarist repression that followed the defeat of the
1905 Russian Revolution, both the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions faced splits, causing further splits in the RSDLP, which manifested themselves from late 1908 and the years immediately following. The Mensheviks split into the "Pro-Party Mensheviks" led by
Georgi Plekhanov, who wished to maintain illegal underground work as well as legal work; and the "Liquidators", whose most prominent advocates were
Pavel Axelrod,
Fyodor Dan,
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov and
Nikolay Chkheidze, who wished to pursue purely legal activities and who now repudiated illegal and underground work. The Menshevik Julius Martov was formally also considered a liquidator, partly because most of his closest political allies were part of the liquidator subfaction. The Bolsheviks split three ways into the Proletary group led by Lenin,
Grigory Zinoviev and
Lev Kamenev, who waged a fierce struggle against the liquidators, ultimatists and recallists; the Ultimatist group led by
Grigory Aleksinsky, who wished to issue ultimatums to the RSDLP Duma deputies to follow the party line or to resign immediately; and the Recallist group led by
Alexander Bogdanov and
Anatoly Lunacharsky with support from
Maxim Gorky, who called for the immediate recall of all RSDLP Duma deputies and a boycott of all legal work by the RSDLP, in favour of increased radical underground and illegal work. There was also a non-faction group led by
Leon Trotsky, who denounced all the "factionalism" in the RSDLP, pushed for "unity" in the party and focused more strongly on the problems of Russian workers and peasants on the ground. In January 1912, Lenin's Proletary Bolshevik group called a conference in Prague and expelled the liquidators, ultimatists and recallists from the RSDLP, which officially led to the creation of a separate party, known as the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), while the Mensheviks continued their activities establishing the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Mensheviks). In August 1912, Trotsky's group tried to reunite all the RSDLP factions into the same party at a conference in Vienna, but he was largely rebuffed by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks seized power during the
October Revolution in 1917 when all political power was transferred to the
soviets and in 1918 changed their name to the
Russian Communist Party. They later banned the Mensheviks after the
Kronstadt rebellion of 1921. The
Interdistrictites, known as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Internationalists), emerged in 1913 as another faction originating from the RSDLP. == Party branches ==