During the revolutionary struggle of 1905-06 the breach between the two
factions was greatly widened. The two groups held utterly irreconcilable
conceptions of Socialist policy, if not of Socialism as an ideal. The
psychology of the two groups was radically different. By this time the
Lenine faction was no longer the majority, being, in fact, a rather small
minority in the party. The Plechanov faction was greatly in the majority.
But the old names continued to be used. Although a minority, the Lenine
faction was still called the Bolsheviki, and the Plechanov faction called
the Mensheviki, despite the fact that it was the majority. Thus Bolshevism
no longer connoted the principles and tactics of the majority. It came to
be used interchangeably with Leninism, as a synonym. The followers of
Vladimir Ulyanov continued to regard themselves as part of the Social
Democratic party, its radical left wing, and it was not until after the
Second Revolution, in 1917, that they manifested any desire to be
differentiated from the Social Democrats.

Vladimir Ulyanov was born in 1870, at Simbirsk, in central Russia. There is
no mystery about his use of the alias, Nikolai Lenine, which he has made
world-famous and by which he chooses to be known. Almost every Russian
revolutionist has had to adopt various aliases for self-protection and for
the protection of other Russian Socialists. Ulyanov has followed the rule
and lived and worked under several aliases, and his writings under the name
"Nikolai Lenine" made him a great power in the Russian Socialist movement.

Lenine's father was a governmental official employed in the Department of
Public Instruction. It is one of the many anomalies of the life of the
Russian Dictator that he himself belongs by birth, training, culture, and
experience to the bourgeoisie against which he fulminates so furiously.
Even his habits and tastes are of bourgeois and not proletarian origin. He
is an Intellectual of the Intellectuals and has never had the slightest