Julius Martov

Born Yuli Osipovich Tsederbaum, Julius Martov was raised in a middle-class and assimilated Russian Jewish family; he spoke French and Russian at home. His paternal grandfather Alexander Zederbaum was a prominent maskil, publisher, and editor in Odessa and St. Petersburg, but Martov grew up in the secular milieu of the Russian intelligentsia, receiving no tradi­tional Jewish education. Having moved to Odessa, the family witnessed a pogrom there in 1881, prompting their relocation to St. Petersburg. Martov attended university in St. Petersburg and became involved with revolutionary activists, leading to his arrest and two-year exile to Vilna. There, he continued his political agitation among Jewish workers and was for some time on good terms with founders of the Jewish Bund. In 1900, after a three-year exile to the Siberian village of Turukhansk, he was forced to leave Russia and con­tinue his revolutionary activity in exile. He cofounded the newspaper Iskra with Vladimir Lenin and other members of the fledgling Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP). Eventually breaking with Lenin, Martov became the leader of the Menshevik faction of the RSDWP, advocating for a diffuse party structure to be built up among workers’ organizations, in contrast to the centralized “avant-gardist” (and dictatorial) vision of single-party revolutionary leader­ship advocated by Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Martov returned in 1917 to Russia, where he failed to have much impact on politics. After the Bolsheviks banned competing parties in 1920 and began persecuting socialists “of the wrong sort,” Martov moved to Berlin, where he died.