Vladimir Lenin in 1903 used the term “Bolsheviks” to exaggerate the size of the support for his political faction, which was small, and used the term “Mensheviks” to minimize the number of his political opponents, who heavily outnumbered his faction.
In 1898, Russian Marxists had organized the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party; this was illegal in tsarist Russia itself, as were all political parties. A congress was organized but had only nine socialist attendees at most, and these were quickly arrested. In 1903, the Party held a second congress to debate events and actions with just over fifty people. Here, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) argued for a party composed only of professional revolutionaries, to give the movement a core of experts rather than a mass of amateurs; he was opposed by a faction led by Julius or L. Martov (two pseudonyms of Yuly Osipovich Tsederbaum 1873–1923) who wanted a model of mass membership like other, western European social-democratic parties.
The result was a division between the two camps. Lenin and his supporters gained a majority on the central committee and, even though it was only a temporary majority and his faction was firmly in the minority, they took for themselves the name Bolshevik, meaning ‘Those of the Majority.’ Their opponents, the faction led by Martov, thus became known as Mensheviks, ‘Those of the Minority,’ despite being the overall larger faction [emphasis added].
“Who Were the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks?” – ThoughtCo
Fast-forward 119 years to see Justin Trudeau refer to a Guinness-record-breaking convoy of truckers opposed to his COVID-19 mandates as a “small fringe minority”: