A people's tragedy - Mensheviks

Menshevism remained a loose movement — high on morals, low on discipline. There was no real Menshevik leader, in the sense that the Bolsheviks

had one, and indeed it was a part of Menshevik ideology to deny the need for one.

the Mensheviks were genuinely more democratic, both in their policies and in their composition, than the Bolsheviks. They tended to attract a broader range of people — more non-Russians, especially Jews and Georgians, more diverse types of workers, petty merchants and members of the intelligentsia — whereas the followers of the Bolsheviks tended to come from a narrower range (the vast majority were Great Russian workers and uprooted peasants).

The Mensheviks were democrats by instinct, and their actions as revolutionaries were always held back by the moral scruples which this entailed.