But before this he was allowed a second chance
and after three years of waiting and petitioning
was readmitted to Kazan University. He was thus
able to complete his university studies before
moving as a fully fledged lawyer to the capital, St
Petersburg. Here he plunged into political activ-
ities and became a leading member of a small
group of socialists. Adopting the agitational tech-
niques of the Lithuanian Jewish socialist organi-
sation, the Bund, the St Petersburg socialists
determined to spread the message of Marxism by
involving themselves in trade union agitation on
behalf of workers. Lenin and his associates agi-
tated successfully among the textile workers. The
police stepped in. Eventually, Lenin was sen-
tenced to three years’ exile in Siberia. In 1900 he
was permitted to return to European Russia. He
had matured as a revolutionary. He believed he
could best promote the revolution by leaving
Russia, as so many socialist émigrés had done
before him, and to organise from safety in the
West. Perhaps the police authorities were happy
to get rid of him. In any event, Lenin in 1900
received the required permission to leave his
country. Except for a few months in Russia after
the outbreak of the revolution in 1905, Lenin
spent the years before his return to Russia in April
1917 mainly as an exile in Switzerland.
Abroad, he developed the organisation of his
revolutionary party based on his own uncompro-
mising ideology. In the process he quarrelled with
the majority of Russian and international socialists
and finally split the Russian Democratic Socialist
Party. His faction, which at the Second Party
Congress in Brussels and London in 1903 man-
aged to gain a majority, became known as the
‘majority’ or Bolsheviks, and the minority took the
name of Mensheviks, although soon the fortunes
were reversed and until 1917 the Mensheviks con-
stituted the majority of the party. It is easier to
define the Bolsheviks’ ideas than the Mensheviks’.
The Bolsheviks thought that leadership was estab-
lished by the power of Lenin’s personality and the
hardness and sharpness of his mind. Lenin imbued
the Bolsheviks with his own uncompromising rev-
olutionary outlook. There was to be no coopera-
tion with the ‘bourgeois’ parties, unless for tactical
reasons it were expedient to support them briefly
and then only as ‘the noose supports a hanged
man’. Lenin believed a broadly based mass party
run by the workers would go the way of the
Labour Party in Britain and weakly compromise.
Only a small elite could understand and master-
mind the seizure of power by the proletariat. The
party must be centralised and unified. Lenin there-
fore sought to build up this party of dedicated rev-
olutionaries who would agitate among the masses
and take advantage of all opportunities, having but
one goal, the socialist revolution.
The Mensheviks were never as united as the
Bolsheviks nor were they led by one man of
commanding personality. In turn, they accused
Lenin of dictatorial behaviour. The Mensheviks
developed their own Marxist interpretations.
Accepting Marx’s stages of development, they
believed that Russia must pass through a bour-
geois capitalist stage before the time would be
ripe for the socialist revolution. And so when
Russia embarked on the constitutional experi-
ment after 1905, they were prepared to support
the constitutional Kadet party in the Duma.
Despite their Marxist authoritarian revolutionary
ideology, the leadership in practice softened the
line of policy. Lenin was never very consistent
about his tactics, but his driving passion for the
socialist revolution, his ruthless pursuit of this
one goal when others in the party wavered and
were distracted, gave him ultimate victory over
the Mensheviks, who endlessly debated and advo-
cated freedom of speech. What true revolutionary
cared for ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’? Lenin
contemptuously regarded rule by the majority as
a liberal bourgeois concept.
Within Russia itself the adherents of the sup-
porters of the Social Democratic Party had little
appreciation of why the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks
were quarrelling in face of the common enemy of
autocracy. It was not among the rank and file, small
in Russia in any case, that their differences mat-
tered. The Bolsheviks had no more than 20,000
members as late as February 1917. In any case it
was neither Mensheviks nor Bolsheviks who won
the greatest popular support but the Socialist
Revolutionaries. Formed in 1901, they looked to
the peasants rather than to the urban workers.
Some carried on the tradition of terror; a special