Julius Martov
| Julius Martov | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum 24 November 1873 Constantinople, Ottoman Empire |
| Died | 4 April 1923 (aged 49) Schömberg, Germany |
Julius Martov or L. Martov (Ма́ртов; real name Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum (Russian: Ю́лий О́сипович Цедерба́ум; IPA: [ˈjʉlʲɪj ˈosʲɪpəvʲɪtɕ tsɨdʲɪrˈbaʊm, ˈmartəf]) (24 November 1873 – 4 April 1923) was a Russian politician who became the leader of the Mensheviks in early 20th-century Russia. He was the founder and editor of Russia's first Jewish journals and newspapers in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian; the Hamelits (the Mediator), the Kol Mevasser (the Harbinger), the Yidisher Folksblat (the Jewish People's Journal), and Vestnik russkikh evreev (the Russian-Jewish Courier).
According to his sister and fellow Menshevik, Lydia Dan, Martov had an 'inexhaustible charm that attracted people'. As a result, some commented it was frequently difficult to record why they followed him, and he confessed himself that 'I have the nasty privilege of being liked by people'.
He was an old friend and mentor of Trotsky. Trotsky later described him as the 'Hamlet of Democratic Socialism'. Lenin later confessed in 1921 that his single greatest regret was 'that Martov is not with us. What an amazing comrade he is, what a pure man!'
Martov was born to a Jewish middle-class family in Constantinople, Turkey (modern day Istanbul). His sister was fellow Menshevik leader Lydia Dan.
He recounted that the famine crisis of 1891 made him a Marxist: 'It suddenly became clear to me how superficial and groundless the whole of my revolutionism had been until then, and how my subjective political romanticism was dwarfed before the philosophical and sociological heights of Marxism.'
Martov was one the Marxists who wanted Nikolay Bauman expelled from the party after an incident where he drove a party member to suicide after drawing a vicious cartoon of her.
In Russia, Martov was originally a close colleague of Vladimir Lenin and with him, and small group of Marxist intellectuals, founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1895. The founders were arrested almost immediately after its establishment; it could however claim some success when local activists of the union organised the textile strike of 30,000 workers in 1896. Both Martov and Lenin were exiled to Siberia for this: Martov was sent to Turukhansk in the Arctic, while Lenin was sent to Shushenskoye in the comparatively warm 'Siberian Italy'. Forced to leave Russia and with other radical political figures living in exile, Martov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and, in 1900, was one of the founding members, with Lenin, of the party journal Iskra. In Munich, Martov was on the editorial board alongside Lenin and Potresov.
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