Originally, he was seen as the leader of the Mensheviks, before he ceded that position to the younger Martov. Axelrod fundamentally disagreed with Lenin's concept of the party as a disciplined organisation of professional revolutionaries who led the workers. He believed that the revolutionaries would eventually take instructions from organised labour, and during the 1905 revolution, he was the author of a proposal to hold a mass workers' conference. After that failure, his influence within the Menshevik party diminished, but he continued to be a spokesman for the Menshevik in international conferences, particularly after the outbreak of war in 1914, when he was part of the Russian delegation at the anti-war Zimmerwald Conference. He argued that a German victory would bring down the regime in Russia, and defended German socialists who supported their government's war efforts. He was then so close to the centrist leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, Karl Kautsky and Hugo Haase, that Lenin accused him of being a 'Germanophile' and a 'chauvinist'.