The question of the nature of the Russian Revolution was fundamental to the divisions among the various currents of thought and political groups in the Russian revolutionary movement. Even within the Social Democratic movement, serious disagreements arose over this question as soon as developments made it a matter of practical significance. From 1904 onward, these disagreements gave rise to two main factions: the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. The Menshevik view was that our revolution would be bourgeois in nature, meaning that its natural outcome would be the transfer of power to the bourgeoisie and the creation of conditions for a bourgeois parliamentary system. The Bolshevik view was that the coming revolution would necessarily be bourgeois in nature, but that its main revolutionary task should be to establish a democratic republic through the joint dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.
