There were nine delegates: from the Jewish Labour Bund, and from the Robochaya Gazeta ("Workers' Newspaper") in Kiev, both formed a year earlier in 1897; and the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in Saint Petersburg.

Specifically, that despite Russia's agrarian nature at the time, the true revolutionary potential lay with the industrial working class.

However, after unprecedented attention from the Belgian authorities the Congress moved to London, meeting on 11 August in Charlotte Street.

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.

[9] 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.

The main difference that emerged in the years after 1903 was that the Bolsheviks believed that only the workers, backed up by the peasantry, could carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary tasks in Russia, which would then provide incentive to socialist revolution in Germany, France and Britain, while the Mensheviks believed that the workers and peasants must seek out enlightened people from the liberal bourgeoisie to carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary tasks in Russia.

Essentially, the difference was that the Bolsheviks considered that in Russia the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution would have to be carried out without the participation of the bourgeoisie.

[12] The Bolsheviks split threeways into the Proletary group led by Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who waged a fierce struggle against the liquidators, ultimatists and recallists; the Ultimatist group led by Grigory Aleksinsky, who wished to issue ultimatums to the RSDLP Duma deputies to follow the party line or to resign immediately; and the Recallist group led by Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky and supported by Maxim Gorky, who called for the immediate recall of all RSDLP Duma deputies and a boycott of all legal work by the RSDLP, in favour of increased radical underground and illegal work.

[12] There was also a non-faction group led by Leon Trotsky, who denounced all the "factionalism" in the RSDLP, pushed for "unity" in the party and focused more strongly on the problems of Russian workers and peasants on the ground.

In August 1912, Trotsky's group tried to reunite all the RSDLP factions into the same party at a conference in Vienna, but he was largely rebuffed by the Bolsheviks.

The Interdistrictites, known as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Internationalists), emerged in 1913 as another faction originating from the RSDLP.

At the conference of the Estonian RSDLP organizations in Terijoki, Finland in March 1907, the Bolshevik supporters came into serious conflict with the Mensheviks.