Pressure to industrialize and end serfdom
"The tsarist state knew that Russia had to industrialize in order to remain in power, just as the tsar and his advisers in 1861 had understood that the serfs had to be freed. Russian cities had grown rapidly. [...] The social and political consequences of these changes could not be controlled, however, within the traditional legal framework of the imperial state."
Impact of the "Bloody Sunday"
"More than 300 marchers, including women and children, fell dead and perhaps 1000 or more were wounded. 'Bloody Sunday' helped shatter the myth that the tsar was the Holy Father, the people's friend, enacting evil policies because he was manipulated by selfish nobles and wicked advisors."
(The peaceful) fall of Tsarist Russia can be traced back to elites losing faith in the regime
Note: Strikingly similar to how the fall of the Soviet Union happened many decades after.
"They believed the tsar's cause lost and that only his abdication could prevent civil war, and perhaps military defeat as well."
"The Russian autocracy had fallen in a matter of days, 'with a sort of fabulous ease,' in the words of a contemporary, with relatively little bloodshed —only about a thousand people had been killed."
Lenin's departure from Marxist view on the introduction of communism
"Some believed that revolution in Russia would have to follow the lines Marx had predicted, that is, after further industrialization, a bourgeois revolution would overthrow the tsarist regime, followed, sometime in the future, by a successful proletarian revolution. Lenin, in contrast, held that a highly centralized party organization could bring about a democratic revolution, perhaps in the near future."
Portrait of Lenin from Western sources
"There was nothing about Lenin's appearance that would have attracted the attention of the tsarist spies or Swiss and French police. An Englishman said that 'he looked more like a provincial grocer than a leader.' [...] The American journalist John Reed described him as: 'a short stocky figure with a big head set down on his shoulders, bald and bulging. [...] Dressed in shabby clothers, his trousers much too long for him ... a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached ... with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms, of analyzing a concrete situation.'"
On the need for elites
Another of Lenin's departures from Karl Marx was the idea of class consciousness as the driver for the proletariat's revolution. For Lenin, the elites were responsible for the revolution given that "only a minority of workers would achieve consciousness," which led to the natural conclusion that it was up to the elite intellectuals to direct the will of the masses in the push towards communism.
The term of Mensheviks translates roughly to the "minority," even as the group was often the one in the most significant numbers.
At its core, the ideology of the Mensheviks stayed more true to Marx's opinion that a bourgeois revolution necessarily preceded the proletariat revolution (and the ushering of communism). As such, given that Tsarist Russia still had low levels of industrialization, most of the members of the Menshevik group "believed that a proletariat revolution lay in the future, but that it could not occur until a bourgeois uprising had first succeeded in overthrowing the tsarist state).