Julius
Martov was
born in Constanipole in 1873. The son of Jewish
middle
class parents, Martov became a close friend of Vladimir
Lenin and in October, 1895, formed the Struggle for the Emancipation
of the Working Classes.
Forced
to leave Russia and with others living in exile, Martov joined the
Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP).
Over the next few years he worked closely with George
Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Vladimir
Lenin and Leon Trotsky in publishing
the party journal Iskra.
At the
Second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party in London
in 1903, there was a dispute between Martov and his long time friend,
Vladimir Lenin. Lenin argued for a small
party of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe of non-party
sympathizers and supporters. Martov disagreed believing it was better
to have a large party of activists.
Martov
based his ideas on the socialist parties that existed in other European
countries such as the British Labour Party.
Lenin argued that the situation was different in Russia as it was
illegal to form socialist political parties under the Tsar's autocratic
government. At the end of the debate Martov won the vote 28-23 .
Vladimir Lenin was unwilling to accept
the result and formed a faction known as the Bolsheviks.
Those who remained loyal to Martov became known as Mensheviks.
Gregory
Zinoviev, Anatoli Lunacharsky,
Joseph Stalin, Mikhail
Lashevich, Nadezhda Krupskaya,
Mikhail Frunze, Alexei
Rykov, Yakov Sverdlov, Lev
Kamenev, Maxim Litvinov, Vladimir
Antonov, Felix Dzerzhinsky,
Gregory Ordzhonikidze and Alexander
Bogdanov joined the Bolsheviks.
Whereas Martov gained the support of George
Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Vera
Zasulich, Leon Trotsky, Lev
Deich, Vladimir
Antonov-Ovseenko,
Irakli Tsereteli, Moisei
Uritsky, Noi Zhordania and Fedor
Dan.
Seen
as the leader of the Mensheviks,
Martov edited the journal Iskra
from November, 1903 to its closure in October, 1905. Along with
George Plekhanov and Leon
Trotsky, he used the journal to attack Vladimir
Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
After
the reforms brought about by the 1905 Revolution,
Martov argued that it was the role of revolutionaries to provide
a militant opposition to the new bourgeois government. He advocated
the joining a network of organizations such as trade unions, cooperatives,
village councils and soviets to harass
the bourgeois government until the economic and social conditions
made it possible for a socialist revolution to take place.
An opponent
of the First World War, Martov worked with
Vladimir Antonov and Leon
Trotsky, to produce the internationalist newspaper, Our
World.
After
the February Revolution Martov returned
to Russia but was too late to stop some Mensheviks
joining the Provisional Government.
He strongly criticized those Mensheviks such as Irakli
Tsereteli and Fedor Dan who now supported
the war effort. However at a conference held on 18th June, 1917,
he failed to gain the support of the delegates for a policy of immediate
peace negotiations with the Central Powers.
Martov
was not invited by the Bolsheviks
to join the government after the October
Revolution. For a while he led the small Menshevik
opposition group in the Constituent Assembly
but in 1918 it was banned along with other political parties by
the Soviet government.
Martov
supported the Red Army against the White
Army during the Russian Civil War,
however, he continued to denounce the persecution of liberal newspapers,
the nobility, the Cadets
and the Socialist Revolutionaries.
In 1920
Martov was forced into exile. He continued to criticize Vladimir
Lenin and the Soviet government but refused to join other anti-communists
exiles in calling for allied intervention in Russia. Julius
Martov
died in Schomberg, Germany, in 1920. On his death, Anatoli
Lunacharsky, a minister in the Soviet government, described
Martov as the Bolsheviks "most
sincere and selfless opponent."
(1)
After the 2nd Congress
of the Social Democratic Labour Party Leon
Trotsky wrote about why the split took place.
One can
say of Lenin and Martov that, even before the split, even before
the Congress, Lenin was 'hard' and Martov 'soft'. And they both
knew it. Lenin would glance at Martov, whom he estimated highly,
with a critical and somewhat suspicious look, and Martov, feeling
his glance, would look down and move his thin shoulders nervously.
How did
I come to be with the 'softs' at the congress? Of the Iskra
editors, my closest connections were with Martov, Zasulitch and
Axelrod. Their influence over me was unquestionable.
The split
came unexpectedly for all the members of the congress. Lenin, the
most active figure in the struggle, did not foresee it, nor had
he ever desired it. Both sides were greatly upset by the course
of events. After the Congress Lenin was sick for several weeks with
a nervous illness.
(2) Alexander Shotman attended the 2nd Congress of
the Social Democratic Labour Party
and after the debate joined the Bolsheviks. He explained his
decision in his book, Reminiscences of an Old Bolshevik,
published in 1932.
Martov resembled a poor Russian intellectual. His face
was pale, he had sunken cheeks; his scant beard was untidy. His
glasses barely remained on his nose. His suit hung on him as on
a clothes hanger. Manuscripts and pamphlets protruded from all his
pockets. He was stooped; one of his shoulders was higher than the
other. He had a stutter. His outward appearance was far from attractive.
But as soon as he began a fervent speech all these outer faults
seemed to vanish, and what remained was his colossal knowledge,
his sharp mind, and his fanatical devotion to the cause of the working
class.
When
Plekhanov spoke, I enjoyed the beauty of his speech, the remarkable
incisiveness of his words. But when Lenin arose in opposition, I
was always on Lenin's side. Why? I cannot explain it to myself.
But so it was, and not only with me, but with my comrades and workers.
(3)
Maxim Gorky
first met Julius Martov at the Fifth Congress of the Social
Democratic Labour Party in 1907.
This amazingly attractive man spoke with the ardour
of youth and was evidently most deeply affected by the tragic drama
of dissension and the split in the Party.
(4)
Nikolai Sukhanov, was a leading member
of the Petrograd Soviet. In his book
The Russian Revolution 1917, he recalled his relationship
with Julius Martov.
I had
seen Martov for the first in Paris in 1903. He was then 29 years
old. At that time he, with Lenin and Plekhanov, made up the editorial
board of Iskra, and he gave propaganda lectures to the Russian colonies
abroad, waged a bitter battle with the SRs, who were increasing
in strength.
Although
I was not convinced by his arguments at that time, I remember very
well the enormous impression made on me by his erudition and his
intellectual and dialectical power. I was, to be sure, an absolute
fledgeling, but I felt Martov's speeches filled my head with new
ideas. Trotsky, in spite of his showiness, did not produce a tenth
of the effect and seemed no more than his echo.
In those
days Martov also revealed his qualities as an orator. He has not
a single external oratorical gift. A completely unimpressive, puny
little body, standing if possible half-turned away from the audience,
with stiff monotonous gestures; indistinct diction, a weak and muffled
voice; his speech in general far from smooth, with clipped words
and full of pauses; finally, an abstractness in exposition exhausting
to a mass audience.
But all
this doesn't prevent him from being a remarkable orator. for a man's
qualities should be judged not by what he does but by what he may
do, and Martov the orator is, of course, capable of making you forget
all his oratorical faults. At some moments he rises to an extraordinary,
breath-taking height. These are either critical moments, or occasions
of special excitement, among a lively, heckling crowd actively "participating
in the debate". When Martov's speech turns into a dazzling
firework display of images, epithets, and similes; his blows acquire
enormous power, his sarcasm's extraordinary sharpness, his improvisations
the quality of a magnificently staged artistic production.
(5)
Morgan Philips Price, My Three Revolutions
(1969)
On November
4th I was present in the Marinsky Palace when the Pre-Parliament
was sitting. Some Cadet (Liberal Imperialist) delegates were attacking
the Menshevik-Intemationalists led by Martov and the representatives
of the Novaya Zhizn, Maxim Gorky's paper, edited by M. Sukhanov.
Since the Bolsheviks, led by Trotsky, had stormed out of the hall,
the Left attitude in the Pre-Parliament was advocated by these two
people. Martov did not hold the doctrinaire view that the alliance
with the middle classes was never to be disturbed as the official
Mensheviks did. He thought the time was coming when the state of
Russia was so serious that it would be necessary for the Soviet
to take over the Government and that an increasing number of Mensheviks
and Socialist-Revolutionaries would agree to this. Therefore, he
disagreed with the action of the Bolsheviks in leaving the Pre-Parliament
and going off to carry out what was their obvious intention of organizing
armed rebellion against Kerensky. He thought that this would only
postpone the time when a sufficiently large body of opinion in the
Soviet and the country would agree to all power going to the Soviets,
at which point the second stage of the revolution would have been
reached.
(6)
Victor Serge,
Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1945)
In 1919
I would visit another dissident, this time a Marxist, whose honesty
and brilliance were of the first order: Martov, co-founder with
Plekhanov and Lenin, of Russian Social Democracy, and the leader
of Menshevism. He was campaigning for working-class democracy, denouncing
the excesses of the Cheka and the Lenin-Trotsky "mania for
authority". He kept saying, "Just as though Socialism
could be instituted by decree, and by shooting people in cellars!"
Lenin, who was fond of him, protected him against the Cheka, though
he quailed before Martov's sharp criticism.
When
I saw Martov he was living on the brink of utter destitution in
a little room. He struck me at the very first glance as being aware
of his absolute incompatibility with the Bolsheviks, although like
them he was a Marxist, highly cultured, uncompromising and exceedingly
brave. Here was a man of scruple and scholarship, lacking the tough
and robust revolutionary will that sweeps obstacles aside. His criticisms
were apposite, but his general solutions verged on the Utopian.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
