Julius Martov (1873-1923)

Martov, pseudonym of Yuly Osipovich Tsederbaum, was one of the leaders of the Russian Mensheviks. Born on November 24, 1873, in a family of Russian Jewish expatriates in Istanbul, later his family had moved back to Russia. In 1891, he entered the University of St. Petersburg and joined a study group of Marxist social democrats in the same year and participated the student movement. He was arrested in 1892 and exiled to Vilna from 1893 to 1895, where he joined the Jewish socialist movement (Bund group) and proposed building a separate Jewish Workers’ Party. In 1895, he returned to Petersburg to participate Marxist social democrats. In November the same year, he led his political group to merge with the “League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class” which was led by Lenin. He was arrested again in 1896 and exiled to Siberia. During his exile, he was in favor of Lenin’s ideological struggles against the Economism trend and participated in the building of the Iskra newspaper, of which he became editors of it in 1900. In 1901, he was exiled abroad, worked in Munich as one of the editors of the Iskra and the Our Dawn magazines, and continued to criticize the Economist trend. At the Second Congress of Russia’s Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, Martov opposed Lenin’s party building principle and argued that Lenin took an autocratic attitude on the issue of the Party’s organizational principles.

After the Second Congress, he led the Mensheviks faction which seized the control of Iskra newspaper, thus Iskra’s line was changed accordingly. Consequently, from February to May 1904, Lenin wrote his famous pamphlet work One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in Our Party) and thoroughly criticized Martov’s views and organizational line. In April 1905, the Bolshevik faction held its Third Congress in London, which included Lenin’s party building principle in the party constitution.

Martov took part in the Russian Revolution which lasted during 1905-1907 and served as one of the deputies of the Social-Democratic Labor Party in the Second Duma since after 1907 for about two years, but later became the leader of the Liquidationst group.

When sent to exile, he became the editor of the Social Democrat’s Voice in 1908 and quit in 1911. In 1912, he participated in organizing the August Bloc of the Mensheviks and edited the Menshevik newspapers Our Dawn and Workers’ Newspaper. After the outbreak of World War I, he led and became one of the founders of the group which called themselves as the “internationalist socialists”. Martov attended the founding conference of the “Internationalist Socialists” in Zimmerwald and Kienthal towns and advocated the “Centrist” position on the war issue. In April 1917, similar to Lenin he returned to Russia from Switzerland and led the newly formed Menshevik-Internationalists group.

He supported the armed seizure of power by the leadership of the Bolshevik party but he and his group both opposed the dictatorship of the proletariat proposed by Lenin, as well as the foreign intervention by imperialist powers and the counterrevolutionary domestic forces, the white guards and others. He advocated that Russia should be transformed into a “democratic” socialist republic “based on close cooperation between the urban proletariat and liberal democratic organizations”. In 1919, he was elected as a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets. In October 1920, he went to Halle city of Germany to attend the Congress of the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany and made a speech at this Congress and attacked Bolsheviks. After this Congress, he remained in Germany and participated in the editorial work of the “Socialist Courier”, which was central organ of the Mensheviks whose central office was in in Berlin. He actively participated in the reconstruction of the Second International and become one of the leaders of the Second-and-half International. He died on April 4, 1923. His main works include The Red Flag in Russia, Proletarian Struggle in Russia, Memoirs of A Social Democrat (the second part was unpublished), and the Social Movement in Russia at the Beginning of the 20th Century which he co-authored with A.N. Potresov.