Every student of the Russian Revolution is presented early on with a little word paradox: that the Mensheviks, though their name means "minority," were the popular majority party in the revolutionary Russia of 1917, while the triumphant Bolsheviks, though their name means "majority," were actually only a minority faction when they came into power.
This paradox in naming is memorable because it effectively symbolizes a broader paradox: the victory of the Bolsheviks in the face of the broader support of the Mensheviks. Just as the Bolsheviks usurped the status of "majority" within the prewar revolutionary Social Democratic movement, so they later seemed to usurp the revolution itself. In the following pages we will examine the factors which led to the success of the Bolsheviks and the ultimate failure of the Mensheviks when the risks and opportunity of revolution presented itself to them.
We today have an advantage in thinking about the Russian Revolution that could not have been dreamed of until a few months ago: we can turn to Cable News Network on television to watch a contemporary Russia that is also in the midst of dramatic, perhaps revolutionary change. We can sense directly something of the confusion that results when all the ordinary machinery of authority and government break down: when bureaucrats cannot obey orders because they receive no orders and are not even sure who has the right to give orders, much less the power to see that orders are carried out. The current confusion reminds us of how uncertain outcomes are in advance. Five years from now, whoever is in charge of what used to be the Soviet Union will seem to have come into power in some logical way, to have been almost inevitable, and we will forget how little we could guess that outcome today.
In the same way, because the Bolsheviks won in the end we examine their history in the expectation that they will w...