Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat - Paperback

by Getzler (Author), Israel Getzler (Author)

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.