Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
Origins and early activities
Members of the RSDLP became popularly labelled as esdeki (Russian: эсдеки, singular: Russian: эсдек, romanized: esdek) - from the Russian-language names of the initial letters S (Russian: С) and D (Russian: Д) standing for "Social Democrats" (Russian: социал-демократы, romanized: sotsial-demokraty).
Origins and early activities
Before the 2nd Party Congress in 1903, a young intellectual named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (better known by his pseudonym, Vladimir Lenin) joined the party. In 1902, he had published What Is To Be Done?, outlining his view of the party's proper task and methodology: to form "the vanguard of the proletariat". He advocated a disciplined, centralized party of committed activists who would fuse the underground struggle for political freedom with the class struggle of the proletariat.
Internal divisions
A central issue at the Congress was the question of the definition of party membership. Martov proposed that a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was "one who accepts its program and supports it both materially and by regular cooperation under the leadership of one of its organizations." On the other hand, Lenin proposed a more strict definition that a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was "one who recognizes the Party's program and supports it by material means and by personal participation in one of the Party's organizations". Martov's big tent definition of party membership initially won the vote 28–23. However, his majority was short-lived, given the exit from the party, for separate reasons, of its Bundist and Economist members who had supported his definition. That left in the majority those in favour of Lenin's definition of party members as, in effect, professional revolutionaries- centrally directed, tightly disciplined, and therefore capable of operating effectively in the tsarist police state. From this was derived the faction names: "Majority" ("Bolshevik") and "Minority" ("Menshevik").
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