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A majority favored resorting to terroristic tactics; Plechanov and a few other well-known revolutionists were opposed favoring the old methods. The society split, the majority becoming known as the Will of the People and adopting a terroristic program. This organization sentenced Czar Alexander II to death and several unsuccessful attempts were made to carry out the sentence.
It will be seen that the position of the Mensheviki was one of practical political opportunism, an opportunism, however, that must be sharply distinguished from what Wilhelm Liebknecht used to call "political cow-trading." No man in the whole history of international Socialism ever more thoroughly despised this species of political opportunism than George Plechanov.
This party was peculiarly a party of the peasants, just as the party of Plechanov was peculiarly a party of industrial workers. It emphasized the land question above all else. It naturally scorned the view, largely held by the Marxists in the other party, that Russia must wait until her industrial development was perfected before attempting to realize Socialism.
Kerensky, Tseretelli, Tchcheidze, Boublikov, Plechanov, Kropotkin, Breshkovskaya, and others, spoke for the workers; General Kornilov and General Kaledine spoke for the military command; Miliukov, Nekrasov, Guchkov, Maklakov, and others spoke for the bourgeoisie.
For the awakened proletariat of the cities the struggle in which they were engaged was economic as well as political. They wisely regarded the political struggle as part of the class struggle, as Plechanov and his friends declared it to be.
But when they witnessed the great victorious onward rush of the Russian army, which for a time manifested such a degree of efficiency as they had never believed to be possible, they began to bestir themselves. From this quarter came the suggestion, very early in the war, as Plechanov and his associates charged in their Manifesto, that the Czar ought to make an early peace with Germany.
The most serious of these plots, in March, 1887, led to the arrest of all the conspirators. In the mean time there had appeared the first definite Marxian Social Democratic group in Russia. Plechanov, Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutsch, and other Russian revolutionists in Switzerland formed the organization known as the Group for the Emancipation of Labor.
The two groups held utterly irreconcilable conceptions of Socialist policy, if not of Socialism as an ideal. The psychology of the two groups was radically different. By this time the Lenine faction was no longer the majority, being, in fact, a rather small minority in the party. The Plechanov faction was greatly in the majority. But the old names continued to be used.
Although a minority, the Lenine faction was still called the Bolsheviki, and the Plechanov faction called the Mensheviki, despite the fact that it was the majority. Thus Bolshevism no longer connoted the principles and tactics of the majority. It came to be used interchangeably with Leninism, as a synonym.
Since his overthrow of the Kerensky régime, and his attempt to establish a new kind of social state in Russia, Lenine has been frequently confronted by his own earlier reasoning by those who believe his position to be contrary to the true Marxian position. From 1903 to 1906 Lenine's views developed farther and farther away from those of his great teacher, George Plechanov.
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