Martov
A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat

This is the first biography of Martov, the founder and leader of Menshevism.

Israel Getzler (Author)

9780521526029, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 September 2003

268 pages
23 x 15.3 x 1.7 cm, 0.42 kg

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.

Subject Areas: General & world history [HBG]