Martov

the long version

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 eh 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 revolution; his later activities as leader of the Menshevik-Internationalists, then the socialist opposition in Bolshevik Russia until 1920, and the Mensheviks in exile and his death. Martov is shown as a noble and tragic figure of modern Russian and Jewish history and of international socialism, and as a key figure to the understanding of all three.