Was Lenin primarily to blame for the party split in 1903?

Question by r0bert999yay: Was Lenin primarily to blame for the split in 1903?
I say no because a critical factor was also the popular unrest in Russia at the time. The party really only split because of Lenin’s and Martov’s disagreements, no?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Joseph
When the party split in 1903, the Bolsheviks continued to organise the workers and peasantry to mass action, while the Mensheviks deviated to the right, holding the belief that a proletarian revolution (excluding the peasantry) could only be accomplished through the bourgeois.
http://www.marxists.org/index.htm
While Martov and Lenin may have been in the same party and shared similar beliefs before the split, they both disliked each other. In particular, Martov distrusted Lenin – especially his methods and his uncompromising demands that things be done his way. As a result of the split, Lenin resigned from ‘Iskra’ and resisted all the attempts that were made to mend the Bolshevik-Menshevik split.

The Bolsheviks financed their work by party supported robberies – what Lenin referred to as “regrettable necessities”. Only individuals or institutions carrying state funds were targeted
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/bolsheviks.htm
When bourgeois ideology and its petty bourgeois anarchist shadow is not seeing communist organisations as malign all-powerful conspiracies that have done huge harm to the interests of mankind, it is dismissing them as risible, impotent, deranged, semi-religious cults that no one listens to anyway; as utopians, armchair theoreticians cut off from reality, incurable sectarians ready to split with each other and stab each other in the back at the drop of a hat. For this line of argument, the 1903 congress provides endless amounts of fuel: didn’t Bolshevism originate in an obscure debate about a simple phrase in the party rules, about who is and who isn’t a party member; still worse, didn’t the final rupture between Menshevism and Bolshevism take the form of a quarrel about which personalities should or shouldn’t be on the editorial board of Iskra? Surely that is proof enough of the futility, the impossibility of building a revolutionary party which is not like the faction-ridden sewers, the battle grounds of egoistic ambition, which we know all bourgeois parties to be?

And yet we persist, along with Lenin, in seeing the 1903 Congress as a profoundly important moment in the history of our class, and in seeing the split between Bolshevism and Menshevism as an expression of deep underlying social tendencies in the workers’ movement, not only in Russia, but across the globe.

The international workers’ movement in 1903

I do not think the word “blame” is right in this context. I agree that the rift between the two ideologies (Bolshevik and Menshevik ).

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