Julius Martov
Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum, better known as Julius Martov, was a Russian revolutionary and a leader of the Mensheviks, the minority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. A close friend and collaborator of Vladimir Lenin in the early years of their revolutionary careers, he became his chief rival after the RSDLP split at its Second Congress in 1903.
Born into a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family in Constantinople, Martov became a Marxist activist in the Russian Empire in the early 1890s. With Lenin, he co-founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1895. Both were arrested shortly after and exiled to Siberia. After his exile, Martov joined Lenin and Georgy Plekhanov in founding the party newspaper Iskra, which became the primary organ of the RSDLP. At the Second Party Congress, Martov's proposal for the definition of party membership, which was broader and more inclusive than Lenin's, was passed. However, after several delegates walked out, Lenin's faction won a vote on the composition of the party's Central Committee, leading to the historic split between Lenin's Bolsheviks and Martov's Mensheviks.
As the leader of the Mensheviks, Martov developed a distinct political philosophy. During the 1905 Russian Revolution, he argued that Russia was only ready for a "bourgeois revolution" and that socialists should remain an opposition force, not seize power. He was a leading internationalist voice during World War I, playing a key role in the Zimmerwald movement that opposed the war. After the February Revolution of 1917, he returned to Russia but refused to join the Provisional Government and condemned his fellow Mensheviks who did.
Following the October Revolution, Martov became the leader of the legal opposition to the Bolshevik government. He denounced the Red Terror, the dissolution of the Russian Constituent Assembly, and the suppression of democratic rights, while simultaneously opposing foreign intervention and the White movement during the Russian Civil War. Forced into exile in 1920, he founded the newspaper Socialist Courier in Berlin, which remained a publication of the Mensheviks in exile for decades. Gravely ill with tuberculosis for much of his life, he died in Germany in 1923. His biographer Israel Getzler described him as "the Hamlet of Democratic Socialism" for his intellectual brilliance, political integrity, and perceived indecisiveness at crucial moments.
Early life and revolutionary beginnings (1873–1893)
Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum was born in Constantinople on 24 November 1873 into a prosperous, assimilated Russian Jewish family. His grandfather, Alexander Tsederbaum, was a prominent figure in the Haskalah, founding the first Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers in Russia. His father, Osip, was a cosmopolitan journalist, working as the Turkish correspondent for several St. Petersburg papers and as an agent for a Russian shipping company. His mother was Viennese by birth, and Martov grew up in a multilingual household. The family moved to Odessa in 1878 when Martov was four. There, he experienced the traumatic pogrom of 1881. The event, along with the official antisemitism of the Tsarist regime, instilled in him a deep alienation from the existing political order. A limp from a childhood fractured leg and his large family's frequent moves contributed to a sense of isolation and injustice, which he countered by creating an idealized imaginary world called "Prilichensk" with his siblings, a world governed by strict moral laws. His sister and fellow revolutionary, Lydia Dan, recalled that this early sense of moral rectitude shaped his political life.Martov's family moved to Saint Petersburg in 1881. In school, he faced both official and social antisemitism, which he and a Jewish friend resisted with "biting witticism and epigrams". He became a voracious reader, absorbing Russian classics and the oppositional writings of Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen. In his mid-teens, he was introduced to the revolutionary underground through his father's liberal friends and stories of the Narodovol'tsy terrorists. His family's near-expulsion from the capital in 1889 under the laws restricting Jewish residence left a lasting impression on him.
In his final years at the gymnasium, Martov formed a democratic circle of like-minded students, where he was introduced to the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, including The Communist Manifesto. He described the Manifesto as having "dazzled me with its picture of a mighty revolutionary party which... would proceed to destroy the old world". In 1891, he was admitted to the University of Saint Petersburg, having secured an exemption from the numerus clausus for Jews through his grandfather's connections. He quickly abandoned his natural science studies for the "fighting companionship" of radical student politics. He became a follower of the Narodovol'tsy and developed a "primitive Blanquist conception of the tasks of revolution".
In early 1892, he was arrested for distributing revolutionary literature. He recalled feeling an "aesthetic satisfaction" at being arrested by the gendarmes, seeing it as a romantic initiation into revolutionary adulthood. During his interrogation, he refused to inform on his comrades and was imprisoned for several months. While in prison and awaiting his sentence, he studied the works of Marx and Georgy Plekhanov. This, combined with disillusionment after witnessing peasants riot against doctors during a cholera epidemic in the wake of the 1891 famine, led him to become a committed Marxist. In his first political work, a preface to a translation of Jules Guesde's Collectivism, Martov outlined the historical trajectory of the Russian revolutionary movement from Populism to Marxist social democracy.
Vilno and St. Petersburg (1893–1900)
Sentenced to two years of administrative exile, Martov chose to go to Vilno in May 1893, which was a centre of the Jewish labour movement. There, he joined a group of seasoned social democratic activists, including Arkadi Kremer. Initially a propagandist teaching political economy to small circles of advanced Jewish workers, Martov soon grew frustrated with the method's limited reach. Along with Kremer, he concluded that the movement needed to shift from propaganda for a few to mass agitation based on the workers' everyday economic grievances. He helped formulate this new tactical line in a May Day speech in 1895 and, most significantly, as editor of the hugely influential pamphlet On Agitation, which became a "handbook of social democratic action" throughout Russia.Martov also developed the ideological rationale for a separate Jewish social democratic party, arguing that the Jewish proletariat faced a double burden of economic exploitation and national oppression. While socialists were internationalists, he contended, they had a duty to fight for the civil rights of oppressed nations. A working class that reconciled itself to its fate as an "inferior race" would never be able to wage a successful class struggle. This required a separate Jewish workers' organization that would lead the fight for Jewish emancipation. These ideas laid the foundation for the Jewish Labour Bund, which was founded in 1897.
File:St Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class - Feb 1897.jpg|thumb|Members of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, 1895. Martov is seated on the right, next to Vladimir Lenin.
In October 1895, his exile over, Martov returned to St. Petersburg. There, he and a small group of fellow intellectuals, including Vladimir Lenin, founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. The group aimed to apply the Vilno agitational method to the large industrial proletariat of the capital, producing leaflets tied to specific factory grievances and connecting them to the broader political struggle against the autocracy. In January 1896, Martov and most of the other leaders of the Union were arrested. He spent over a year in prison before being sentenced to three years of exile in the remote village of Turukhansk in Siberia, just below the Arctic Circle.
The isolation and harsh climate of Turukhansk undermined his health, and he likely contracted the throat tuberculosis that plagued him for the rest of his life. He survived through journalism, correspondence, and an intense intellectual friendship with Lenin, who was exiled further south. In his writings from exile, he continued to develop his political ideas, producing a history of the Russian labour movement, The Red Flag in Russia, and a critique of the growing revisionist trend of "Economism" within the party. In 1899, Lenin proposed that they, along with Alexander Potresov, form a political triumvirate to combat revisionism and revive the party. Martov enthusiastically agreed, and upon the end of his exile in early 1900, he immediately began organising for their joint project.
''Iskra'' and the Second Party Congress (1900–1903)
After a tour of Russia to establish connections, including a mission to the South to line up agents for their future newspaper, Martov joined Lenin and Potresov in Munich in April 1901. Together with the "old guard" of Russian Marxism in Switzerland—Georgy Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, and Vera Zasulich—they launched the newspaper Iskra. Martov became a leading journalist for the paper, writing numerous articles against Economism, Socialist-Revolutionary "adventurism", and Bundist "separatism". During the Munich period, his friendship and collaboration with Lenin were at their height. However, tensions began to surface after the editorial board moved to London in 1902. The first major crack appeared over the "Bauman affair", a case concerning the unethical conduct of a party activist. Martov, Zasulich, and Potresov demanded an investigation, while Lenin and Plekhanov dismissed it as a personal matter outside the party's competence, a stance Martov saw as a violation of party ethics. As early as 1897, Martov had sided with Lenin in debates against "worker-philism", arguing that leadership of the revolutionary movement by the intelligentsia was a "strategical formula to bring about in the most expeditious manner a direct struggle with the autocracy."The simmering disagreements came to a head at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in Brussels and London in the summer of 1903. The conflict erupted over the wording of Paragraph 1 of the party statutes, which defined party membership. Lenin proposed a narrow definition, limiting membership to those who personally participated in a party organisation. Martov, by contrast, proposed a broader formulation, extending membership to anyone who accepted the party programme and worked "under the guidance of one of the party organizations". Martov argued that Lenin's model was overly conspiratorial and would exclude many workers and intellectuals who were sympathetic but unable to become full-time revolutionaries. He envisioned a wide party that constituted "the conscious expression of an unconscious process", a "fly-wheel bringing into movement the work of the party as a whole", while Lenin sought a disciplined, centralized organization of professional revolutionaries.
Martov's formula was passed by 28 votes to 23. However, the balance of power shifted when the seven delegates from the Bund and the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad walked out of the congress after their own proposals were defeated. Lenin used his new, narrow majority to push through his slate for the Central Committee and the Iskra editorial board. He proposed reducing the board from six to three—Plekhanov, Lenin, and Martov—effectively ousting the veteran Marxists Axelrod and Zasulich, as well as Potresov. Outraged by this "state of siege" and what he saw as a violation of comradely principles, Martov refused to serve on the new board and rallied the defeated minority in opposition. From this split emerged the two factions of Russian Social Democracy: Lenin's Bolsheviks and Martov's Mensheviks.