Alexander Samoilovich Martynov

Martynov recalled that as a schoolboy, moved by Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, he imitated its hero Rakhmetov by slowly stubbing out cigarettes on his hand. In 1884 he entered the law faculty of St Petersburg University and joined Narodnaya Volya; arrested again in 1886 for joining a demonstration, he spent two years in solitary confinement in Odessa and was exiled to Eastern Siberia for ten years. Returning in 1899, he became a social democrat.

Emigrating in 1900, he joined the editors of Rabocheye Delo, the organ of the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad. He argued that the party should be guided by the spontaneous initiative of Russian workers and confront the government on concrete issues such as pay and working conditions, where real improvements could be won. His claim that "the economic struggle is the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into active political struggle" was aimed at the Iskra editors, whom he accused of fixing on long-term political issues remote from the workers' immediate experience.

In What Is to Be Done? (1902) Lenin devoted whole sections to attacking the "Economists". Martynov's error, Lenin wrote, was to think it possible to develop the workers' class political consciousness "from within", when it could be brought to them "only from without". At the Second Congress in July 1903 Martynov replied that Lenin's reliance on professional revolutionaries opened a deep fissure between the leading elements of the movement and the working-class masses. But when the congress refused to recognise the Union Abroad as a constituent organisation he walked out with Akimov, so he was absent when the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. He then joined the Mensheviks and became the theorist Trotsky called the "semi-official philosopher of Menshevist tactics".