Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat

by Israel Getzler

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521526029
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/18/2003
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

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.