Lenin’s oldest friend and most principled adversary
In 1918 Martov published an exposé revealing that Stalin had been expelled from the party in 1907. Stalin sued him for libel, and the revolutionary tribunal sentenced Martov to 'public censure.'
He built Iskra alongside Lenin, then split with him in 1903 over a single clause on party membership and led the Mensheviks. After October he stayed, fighting to keep a legal opposition alive, and in 1920 was permitted to leave. He died of tuberculosis in Berlin. It is told that the dying Lenin asked after him.
Career Timeline
- 1895Co-founds the Petersburg League of Struggle with Lenin
- 1900–03On Iskra; leads the Mensheviks after the split
- 1914–17Anti-war internationalist
- 1917–20Leads the Menshevik Internationalists; tries legal opposition
- 1921–23Founds the Socialist Courier in Berlin
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Menshevik leaderHe returned to Russia in 1905, worked in the Soviet and the Menshevik press, and debated the Bolsheviks over the tactics and prospects of the revolution.
- 1917.02–07The February RevolutionMenshevik InternationalistLeading the Menshevik Internationalists, he consistently opposed entry into the coalition and the continuation of the war.
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionMenshevik-Internationalist leaderAt the Second Congress of Soviets he proposed an all-socialist coalition, and walked out when it was voted down.
Summer 1903: Parting with His Closest Comrade
Julius Martov was Lenin's closest early comrade. In 1895 the two founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in St Petersburg, were arrested in turn and served terms of Siberian exile, and from 1900 edited Iskra together in emigration. Their comrades thought of them as a pair.
At the Second Congress of the RSDLP, held in Brussels and London in the summer of 1903, they split over Paragraph 1 of the party rules. Martov wanted the party's doors opened wide, with regular cooperation under its guidance sufficing for membership; Lenin insisted that a member must belong personally to a party organization. Martov won that vote, but after the Bund and Economist delegates walked out, Lenin's faction won the elections to the central bodies and took the name of the majority, Bolsheviks, leaving Martov's followers the name of the minority, Mensheviks.
The difference over one clause grew into a difference over the whole conception of the party, and then into the two currents of Russian Social Democracy. The break was political, but the wound was personal: memoirs record that Lenin grieved over the rupture with Martov for years afterwards.
October 1917: Remaining an Opposition Within the Revolution
When the war broke out, Martov stood with the internationalist left even within Menshevism: he rejected defencism, attended the Zimmerwald anti-war conference, and opposed the continuation of the war throughout 1917. On the night of the October insurrection (7 November New Style), at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, he proposed a coalition government of all socialist parties to avert bloodshed. As the proposal died and he walked out, Trotsky's famous words followed him: from now on, your place is in the dustbin of history.
Yet Martov never crossed over to the counterrevolution. He remained in Russia as a legal opposition, criticizing repression and the Red Terror while calling on workers to defend the revolution against the Whites and foreign intervention; in 1919 he was even elected to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In 1920, gravely ill, he left the country legally and founded the Sotsialistichesky Vestnik in Berlin. He died of tuberculosis on 4 April 1923.
According to Krupskaya, Lenin, by then on his own sickbed, kept asking after Martov's condition with unconcealed affection: they say Martov is dying too. The two men who had fought each other for a lifetime died within a year of one another, and Martov is remembered as the critic who never betrayed the revolution.