Martov A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat

This is the first biography of Martov, the founder and leader of Menshevism. It records his revolutionary apprenticeship in Vilno and St Petersburg in 1893–6; his early friendship and partnership with Lenin in Siberian exile and on the revolutionary newspaper Iskra in Munich and London; the dramatic break-up of that partnership at the Second Congress of Russian Social Democrats in 1903 and the division between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks; the ensuing feud between Martov and Lenin; Martov's role in the 1905 revolutions; his later activities as leader of the Menshevik-Internationalists, then of the socialist opposition in Bolshevik Russia until 1920, and of the Mensheviks in exile, until his death. Martov is shown as a noble and tragic figure of modern Russian and Jewish history and of international socialsm, and as a key figure to the understanding of all three.

Preface; Abbreviations; 1. A grandson of the Haskalah; 2. Revolutionary apprenticeship; 3. Fighting companionship; 4. The parting of the ways; 5. 1905 - a 'Bourgeois' Revolution; 6. The missed opportunity; 7. War and Revolution; 8. 'Straightening-out' the Bolshevik Revolution; 9. The fiasco of 'socialist intervention'; 10. 'The Hamlet of democratic socialism'?; Bibliography; Index.

This is the first biography of Martov, the founder and leader of Menshevism. It records his life story from his revolutionary apprenticeship in Vilno and St Petersburg in 1893-6, through the division between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and the feud between Martov and Lenin, to the Mensheviks in exile and Martov's death.