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Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum (24 November 1873 – 4 April 1923), better known as Julius Martov, was a Russian revolutionary and the leader of the Mensheviks, the minority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). 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 Marxism 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, Lenin's faction won a vote on the composition of the party's Central Committee, leading to the historic split between Lenin's Bolsheviks ("majority-ites") and Martov's Mensheviks ("minority-ites").
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 ( Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik) 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 Prince Hamlet of Democratic Socialism" for his intellectual brilliance, political integrity, and perceived indecisiveness at crucial moments.
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 Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) 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 science studies for the "fighting companionship" of radical student politics. He became a follower of the Narodovol'tsy and developed a "primitive Blanquism conception of the tasks of revolution". In early 1892, he was arrested for distributing revolutionary literature. 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 and became a committed Marxist. In his first political work, a preface to a translation of Jules Guesde's Collectivism (January 1893), Martov outlined the historical trajectory of the Russian revolutionary movement from Narodniks to Marxist social democracy.
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.
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 (1899), 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.
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 embedded in the working class, 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 (from bol'shinstvo, "majority") and Martov's Mensheviks (from men'shinstvo, "minority").
Martov returned to Russia in October 1905, after the October Manifesto was issued. He became a leading figure in the Saint Petersburg Soviet and helped found newspapers to articulate the Menshevik position. He developed the concept of "revolutionary self-government", arguing that socialists should foster the creation of a network of democratic institutions—soviets, trade unions, and local committees—that would act as a check on the government and prepare the ground for a future socialist society. The defeat of the December uprising and the subsequent wave of repression confirmed for Martov the correctness of his cautious approach. Arrested in February 1906, he was exiled again after several months in prison.
The Mensheviks and Bolsheviks formally reunited at the Fifth Party Congress in London in 1907, but the unity was short-lived. In 1912, Lenin organized a separate conference in Prague and established a purely Bolshevik party, formalizing the split. Martov and his fellow Mensheviks responded by organizing the "August Bloc" of non-Bolshevik social democrats. Despite his opposition to Lenin's organisational methods, Martov continued to believe that unity with the Bolsheviks was both necessary and possible, a view that often put him at odds with other Mensheviks.
The February Revolution of 1917 caught Martov by surprise in Switzerland. He was desperate to return to Russia but was blocked by the Allied governments. Along with other revolutionaries in exile, he arranged to travel back through Germany in a "sealed train". He arrived in Petrograd on 9 May 1917, over a month after Lenin. He found his own Menshevik party deeply divided and its official leadership, led by Irakli Tsereteli and Fyodor Dan, committed to a policy of "revolutionary defensism" and participation in a coalition government with the liberal bourgeoisie. Martov strongly condemned both policies, arguing that they tied the fate of the revolution to an imperialist war and abdicated the socialists' role as an independent voice of the working class.
As leader of the "Menshevik-Internationalist" faction, he advocated an immediate struggle for a general democratic peace and the creation of a government composed exclusively of socialist parties. For months, he remained in the minority within his own party. However, as the Provisional Government's failures mounted and the war dragged on, his position gained support. By the autumn of 1917, Martov's policy of an all-socialist government had won a majority at the Democratic Conference. But the opportunity was missed. On the eve of the October Revolution, the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders, over Martov's objections, agreed to a new coalition government under Alexander Kerensky, leaving the path open for the Bolsheviks.
Despite his opposition to the coup, Martov believed that an armed struggle against the Bolsheviks would only unleash a bloody counter-revolution. For a brief period, he took a leading role in the Vikzhel negotiations for the formation of an all-socialist coalition government, but the talks collapsed due to the intransigence of both Lenin and the anti-Bolshevik right. From that point on, Martov led the Menshevik party as a legal opposition to the Bolshevik regime. In the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), the Soviet "parliament", he became the most prominent and courageous critic of the government, denouncing the Red Terror, the suppression of newspapers, the abolition of democratic rights, and the persecution of political opponents. He was particularly scathing about the revival of the death penalty, the show trial of Admiral Alexey Schastny, and the summary executions carried out by the Cheka.
In June 1918, the Mensheviks were expelled from the VTsIK and their newspapers were closed down. During the Russian Civil War, Martov's Mensheviks adopted a policy of standing "not by the enemies of the revolution, but by the revolution itself", meaning they would support the Soviet state militarily against the White movement while maintaining political opposition to the Bolshevik regime. This complex stance won them few friends. After the defeat of the Whites, the Bolsheviks renewed their persecution of the Mensheviks. By 1920, the party was largely operating in a semi-legal state, its leaders and activists subject to constant harassment and arrest.
Martov settled in Berlin, which became the new centre of the Menshevik Party in exile. In February 1921, he launched the newspaper Socialist Courier ( Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik), which he edited until his death. The paper became the main voice of Menshevism for the next four decades. He also became a leading figure in the International Working Union of Socialist Parties (the "Vienna" or "Two-and-a-Half International"), an alliance of centrist socialist parties that sought a middle path between the reformism of the Second International and the authoritarianism of the Comintern.
In his final writings, Martov analyzed the New Economic Policy (NEP) in Russia. He argued that it represented a retreat from the "Utopian" attempt to impose socialism by force and created a new historical situation. He concluded that Russia was undergoing a "Bonapartism perversion of the revolution", with a Red dictatorship resting on a quasi-capitalist economic base. He feared this would lead to a counter-revolutionary restoration from within the Bolshevik apparatus itself. The only alternative, he argued, was a full democratic liquidation of the Bolshevik regime and the establishment of a constitutional republic.
Martov, who had been mortally ill for years, died of tuberculosis on 4 April 1923 in a sanatorium in Schömberg, Germany, at the age of 49.
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