Julius Martov

Julius Martov
Julius Martov
Юлии Мартов
	Martov in 1917
Born	Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum; 24 November 1873; Constantinople, Ottoman Empire
Died	4 April 1923 (aged 49); Schömberg, Republic of Baden, Weimar Republic
Political party	Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Mensheviks
Movement	Socialism, Marxism

Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum^[a] (24 November 1873 – 4 April 1923), better known as Julius Martov,^[b] was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and the leader of the Mensheviks, a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). A close associate of Vladimir Lenin prior to 1903, Martov broke with him following the RSDLP's ideological schism, after which Lenin led the opposing faction, the Bolsheviks.

Martov was born to a middle-class and politically active Jewish family in Constantinople. He was raised in Odessa and embraced Marxism after the Russian famine of 1891–1892. Martov briefly enrolled at Saint Petersburg Imperial University, but was later expelled and exiled to Vilna, where he developed influential ideas on worker agitation. Returning to Saint Petersburg in 1895, Martov collaborated with Vladimir Lenin to co-found the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, and after three years of Siberian exile moved to Western Europe with Lenin, where they became active members of the RSDLP and co-founded the party newspaper Iskra. At the second RSDLP Congress in 1903, a schism developed between their supporters; Martov became the leader of the Menshevik faction against Lenin's Bolsheviks.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Martov returned to Russia and led the faction of Mensheviks who opposed the Provisional Government. He advocated an "all-socialist" coalition government, but found himself politically marginalised following the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks came to power. Martov continued to lead the Mensheviks and denounced many of the Soviet government's repressive measures during the civil war, such as the Red Terror, while supporting the struggle against the Whites.

In 1920, Martov left Russia for Germany, and the Mensheviks were outlawed in Russia a year later. He died from tuberculosis in 1923. His biographer, Israel Getzler, concluded that he was too honest and humane to be a successful revolutionary leader, but that he personified Russian social democracy's moral conscience.
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