The Mensheviks desired a democratically run party with a large membership, akin to the German SDP and other West European socialist parties. The Bolsheviks envisioned the party as an elite group of professional revolutionaries who would offer centralized leadership for the working class. Lenin considered that a democratic mass party would just aim to change workers' pay, hours, and living circumstances, whereas he desired a revolution that would alter Russia.

In 1905, Lenin supplemented his organizational theory with a Russian revolution program. He encouraged the socialist revolution to unite the proletariat and the peasantry in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution. Lenin understood the Russian countryside's deep dissatisfaction better than any other revolutionary.

He predicted that the tsarist authority would be unable to repress a rebel coalition of workers and peasants. Later Bolshevik action was directed by Lenin's two principles: an elite party and a twofold social revolution.

The Bolsheviks eventually took power in November 1917, altering the political landscape of the twentieth century, but only after the chaos of World War I had weakened support for the monarch and only after other political forces had already deposed the tsarist administration in February 1917.

The differences between exiled Russian socialists and Lenin's ideas had little direct impact on events in Russia. Resentment remained high as a result of industrialization. In order to pacify the criticism, Nicholas II fired Witte in 1903. The next year, in reaction to hostilities in Manchuria and Korea, Russia declared war on Japan, partially in the expectation that the battle would mobilize public support for the tsar. Instead, the Russians lost the war, and the leadership faced a political crisis among its own ranks.

Early in 1905, the Japanese took Port Arthur, Russia's naval outpost on the Chinese coast. A few days later, on January 22, a Russian Orthodox priest called Father George Gapon led a group of hundreds of employees to present the tsar with a petition to improve working conditions.

On the one hand, some socialists, represented here by Eduard Bernstein, came to reject many of Karl Marx's views, notably those of a proletariat revolution, and embraced democratic politics as the best method to achieve their aims of improving the working class's existence.

Others, represented here by Lenin, rejected democracy and embraced the notion of violent revolution achieved by a limited professional elite rather than a spontaneous proletariat insurrection.

After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, such divides would play out in an extraordinarily violent fight in the twentieth century between democratic socialist parties in Western Europe and Communists in the Soviet Union and Communist parties in Western Europe ruled by the Soviet Union.

Early in 1906, Nicholas II announced the formation of the Duma, a two-chambered parliamentary assembly.

He did, however, keep cabinet appointments, financial policy, and military and international affairs to himself.

The April elections resulted in a group of lawmakers that were quite radical. The emperor subsequently replaced Witte with P. A. Stolypin (1862–1911), who was opposed to parliamentary rule. Nicholas was convinced to dissolve the Duma by Stolypin. In February 1907, a new legislature was elected. Cooperation was once again impossible, and the emperor abolished the Duma in June.

A third Duma, elected in late 1907 on a more conservative franchise, proved flexible enough for the emperor and his minister. Thus, Nicholas II had reclaimed much of the area within two years of the 1905 Revolution.

Stolypin set about crushing the insurrection, eliminating some of its origins, and uniting property owners behind the tsarist rule. Early in 1907, special field courts-martial sentenced over 700 insurgent peasants to death.

Stolypin had annulled any redemption payments owing to the government by peasants from the release of the serfs in 1861 before embarking on this crackdown in November 1906. The new land regulations were accepted by the Duma's moderate liberals. They were drawn to the concept of competitiveness and individual property ownership.

The Constitutional Democrats desired a more authentically parliamentary form of governance, but they compromised in order to avoid further revolutionary upheavals. However, hatred of Stolypin remained strong among the country's older conservative factions, and industrial workers remained hostile to the dictator.

Stolypin was slain in 1911 by a Social Revolutionary, who may have been a police agent working for conservatives. Nicholas II was unable to find a suitable successor. His administration merely fumbled along.

Meanwhile, at court, the monk Grigory Efimovich Rasputin (1871–1916) rose to prominence due to his supposed ability to treat the tsar's hemophilic son Alexis, the heir to the throne, when medicine was unable to assist the youngster.

After 1911, the tsar's and his government's position was undercut by the tsar's and his government's disproportionate influence, as well as ongoing societal unrest and conservative opposition to any more liberal changes. As in 1904, he and his ministers believed that a strong foreign policy move might be made.

The Ninth of January, as well as Nicholas and Alexandra, a sumptuous 1971 film loyal to the monarch and blaming Bloody Sunday on fearful and inept authorities.

While Nicholas did not command the troops to fire and was not even present in St. Petersburg on Bloody Sunday, the atrocity effectively ended any hope of reconciliation between the tsarist authority and the Russian working class.

From 1860 to 1914, two seemingly opposing trends evolved in European social life. On the one hand, the urban middle-class lifestyle became the standard to which much of society aspired. A relatively small family living in its own house or big apartment, servants, and a woman who did not make an income were all aspects of this lifestyle. The various material luxuries provided by the Second Industrial Revolution helped the middle classes in general.

During the same time period, socialism and labor unions played a new and significant role in European political life. Their leaders urged more social fairness and a more equitable distribution of Europe's large amounts of consumer goods. Some socialists strove to achieve their goals in one manner or another.

Some socialists attempted to operate inside existing political structures in some fashion. Others, notably in Russia, agitated for revolution. The rise in wealth and the availability of new products and services exacerbated the injustices endured by the poor, and the disparity between them and the middle classes heightened labor's and socialists' demands. The stresses of early industrialisation exacerbated social instability in Russia.

These tensions, along with a devastating setback in a war against Japan, sparked the failed revolt of 1905.

The working class, on the other hand, was not alone in its desire for change. For the first time in European history, women began to seek political roles and to oppose gender injustices rooted in legislation and family life.

They were entering the professions and playing an important part in the service economy, such as the new telephone businesses. These developments, together with socialist demands, would eventually call into question the appropriateness of the much-admired late-nineteenth-century middle-class lifestyle.