Mezhraiontsy

The Mezhraiontsy (Russian: межрайонцы, IPA: [mʲɪʐrɐˈjɵnt͡sɨ]), usually translated as the "Interdistrictites," were members of a small independent faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), which existed between 1913 and 1917. Although the organization's formal name was the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Internationalists), the names "Mezhraionka" for the organization and "Mezhraiontsy" for its participants were commonly used to indicate the group's intermediate ideological position between the rival Menshevik and Bolshevik wings of the divided RSDLP.

The Mezhraiontsy merged with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Background

Russian social democrats had been split into numerous factions along political and ethnic lines since at least 1903 when the original divisions between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks arose. After the defeat of the Russian Revolution of 1905, both the Bolshevik and the Menshevik factions split into smaller factions. In January 1912, the dominant Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, held a meeting in Prague, and expelled Mensheviks from the party. In response, the Mensheviks, Leon Trotsky's followers, the Jewish Bund and other ethnic social democratic groups held a meeting in Vienna in August 1912 in which they called Lenin's action illegal and formed their own leadership of the RSDLP, the so-called August Bloc. To distinguish between competing RSDLPs, the Bolshevik one was called RSDLP(b) and the Menshevik one RSDLP(m).

As a result of the developments, by late 1912 there were two separate social democratic organizations in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks had their "St.