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Mensheviks and liberal Cadets, argued that running their own candidates would split the democratic party and aid the reactionary proto-fascist Black Hundreds.

Lenin followed Marx and Engels’ advice that the workers’ movement should not be persuaded by the claim of the bourgeois Democrats that in running their own candidates “they are splitting the democratic party and giving the reactionaries the possibility of victory.”

"Even when there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection they must not allow themselves to be seduced by such arguments of the democrats as, for example, that by so doing they are splitting the democratic party and making it possible for the reactionaries to win. The ultimate intention of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is indefinitely more important than the disadvantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body."

— Karl Marx, The Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, 1850

His instructions to the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) deputies who were elected to the Duma in which the liberal Cadet party was hegemonic were all-so revealing:

“Our task is not to support the Cadet Duma, but to use the conflicts within this Duma, or connected with it, for choosing the right moment to attack the enemy, the right moment for an insurrection against the autocracy. . . As a means of testing public opinion and defining as correctly and precisely as possible the moment when “boiling point” is reached . . . but only as a symptom, not as the real field of struggle. . . . Our task is to use the respite that will be provided by an opposition Duma (and as the proletariat needs time to rally its forces properly, this respite will be very much to our advantage), to organise the workers, to expose constitutional illusions, and to prepare for a military offensive. Our task is to be at our post when the Duma farce develops into a new great political crisis; and our aim then will be, not support for the Cadets (at best they will be only a weak mouthpiece of the revolutionary people), but the overthrow of the autocratic government and the transfer of power to the revolutionary people.”

– (Lenin Collected Works, 10: 237-38)

To not run their own campaign, he replied, would deny the RSDLP the opportunity to know its true strength within the proletariat, in other words, its reason for existence. Also, according to his calculations, the Cadets were exaggerating the probability of Black Hundred victory. (Just like how democrats in USA argue that the republicans will win progressive seats if socialists split the democrat vote)

Though Lenin couldn’t persuade his Menshevik comrades with his arguments, he felt vindicated when the election results revealed that indeed a Black Hundred victory was unlikely. In retrospect, his debate with the Mensheviks may have been the beginning of the end of the Bolshevik-Menshevik coalition.

That the Bolsheviks proved eventually to be more influential than the Mensheviks with Russia’s proletariat was not coincidental. Lenin’s 1906-1907 writings constitute the Marxist movement’s first, and maybe only, detailed response to the lesser evil/splitting-the-vote conundrum.

The St. Petersburg Elections and the Hypocrisy of the Thirty-One Mensheviks

When they reappeared in the February Revolution of 1917, the soviets began to increasingly function as an alternative to the parliamentary-like Duma bodies. Because they were more democratic than the latter and thus more representative of public opinion, Lenin immediately recognized that the soviets could be more effective than the Dumas in realizing his vision for working-class ascent via “a military offensive.” Five months after the Bolshevik victory, he explained their success as following,

"As matters stood in October, we had made a precise calculation of the mass forces. We not only thought, we knew with certainty, from the experience of the mass elections to the Soviets that the overwhelming majority of the workers and soldiers had already come over to our side in September and in early October. We knew . . . that the [provisional government] had also lost the support of the peasantry — and that meant that our cause had already won."

– collected works of Lenin, 27: 25