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THE SPLIT INTO TWO
PARTIES
As a result of
increasing differences, a final split between the two factions occurred in 1912.
Thereafter the two parties, together with others, competed for the leadership of
the antitsarist revolution. The Bolsheviks used both legal and underground
tactics to advance their programme, building a membership, in accordance with
Lenin's original specifications, of about 45,000 by March 1917, and 240,000 by
July of that year. The Bolsheviks opposed World War I as an imperialist conflict
in which socialists should have no part, but the Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries, placing national before class interests, supported and
eventually attempted to take leadership in the Russian war effort. As a result
of the collapse of the Russian armies and the growing awareness of the
inefficiency of the government, a revolution broke out in March 1917, resulting
in the abdication of the tsar and the introduction of parliamentary government.
The provisional government, which included Mensheviks, was charged by the
Bolsheviks with an unwillingness to expand the revolution in the direction of
socialism. The Bolsheviks undertook this task through the soviets of workers and
soldiers. The Bolsheviks seized state power in November 1917. In 1918, under the
new name of the Communist (Bolshevik) party adopted from an earlier organization
led by Marx, they began their career as the dominant, and later, by decree, the
sole political organization in the USSR. The subsequent history of the theory
and practice of Bolshevism is indistinguishable from that of Soviet Communism.
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