Martov, Julius

(Julii Osipovich Tsederbaum)

(1873–1923)

   Russian revolutionary. Though Martov’s grandfather was a well-known Jewish writer and early Zionist, he grew up in an assimilationist home, and as a student in St Petersburg was drawn into a revolutionary circle. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Party in its formative years after 1894. He was at first identified with the Bund, a Jewish socialist movement, but later rejected its sectarian basis. In 1901, Martov joined with Lenin and Potresov in producing the revolutionary journal, Iskra. At the Brussels-London conference of the party in 1903, Martov held to the concept of a mass party that would be broadly based, democratic and non-violent. He therefore opposed Lenin’s concept of a small elite of professional revolutionaries to organize the overthrow of the regime by violence. The party split into two on this issue. The majority (Bolsheviki) followed Lenin and the minority (Mensheviki) seceded, with Martov among its leading figures.

   Except for a brief return to St Petersburg at the time of the 1905 revolution, Martov remained in exile in Paris, where he continued with party work as the main spokesman for the Mensheviks. After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, he returned to Russia and for the next three years vainly protested against the increasingly dictatorial and repressive policies of the new Soviet hierarchy. In 1920, he was allowed to leave and settled in Berlin as the leader of the Mensheviks outside Russia.

   Martov produced a massive four-volume history (1909–14) of the social democratic movement in Russia. The evolution of his own political creed is set out in an autobiographical work, ‘Notes of a Social Democrat’ (1923). His belief that the revolution would solve the Jewish problem is most clearly reasoned in ‘The Russian People and the Jews’ (1908).