"This music makes me want to speak sweet nonsense and pat on the head people who can create such beauty while living in this filthy hell. Nowadays we can't pat heads. We've got to hit heads, hit them without mercy."
-- Lenin, on listening to Beethoven
The first Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, later to become the Communist Party, consisted of just nine delegates representing four labor unions, a workers' newspaper and the Jewish Social Democratic Bund. The nine delegates met in Minsk on the first three days of March 1898, proclaimed themselves a party, called for the overthrow of the Romanov rulers and then returned to their homes, where eight of the nine were promptly arrested. The fact that the heirs of this absurd little group actually did overthrow the Russian government not 22 years later was due largely to the malign genius of one man who wasn't even present at the Minsk meeting: Vladimir Ulyanov, who called himself Lenin (also at various times Meyer, Richter and Jordanov).
Son of a highly cultured schoolteacher, Lenin was expelled from school for taking part in a student protest. While idling at home, he discovered the works of Karl Marx, which prophesied the inevitable collapse of capitalism and its empires. He did finally get a law degree, but his fascination with Marxism led him to Switzerland, to an encounter with the exiled Georgi Plekhanov, the eminence grise of Russian Marxism; then to meetings with other radicals in Paris and Berlin; then, on his return home, to arrest, trial, jail and exile in Siberia. So Lenin was far away when the Social Democratic Party was born in Minsk and then nearly destroyed. But when he emerged from Siberia in 1900, he once again joined forces with Plekhanov and vowed to start a newspaper that would organize a rebirth of the Social Democrats beyond the reach of the Czar's police. Lenin's newspaper, Iskra (Spark), appeared in Munich at the end of that year, and a second meeting of the party opened in Brussels in 1903.
The tiny party immediately divided. Lenin was determined that it should remain small, highly disciplined and "as conspiratorial as possible." It must be the "vanguard of the working class" but no more than a vanguard. Lenin's more open-minded opponents wanted to take in any and all supporters, find partners and make coalitions. Lenin, as usual, insisted on getting his way, and he got it. With their majority, the Leninists took the name of Bolshevik, after bolshoi, big. The smaller group was called Mensheviks (minority).