A Socialist Courier

Martov was born in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, in 1873, and spent his childhood in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa. His real name was Iulii Osipovich Tsederbaum; like many Russian revolutionaries, he adopted a pseudonym that became his most commonly used name. In his short life, Martov made innumerable contributions to the theory and practice of socialism, which can only be sketched in outline here.

In 1895, while exiled in the predominantly Yiddish-speaking Pale of Settlement city Vil’na (today Vilnius), Martov delivered a May Day speech to a meeting of young socialists. It has gone down in history as the founding ideological statement of the Bund — the General Jewish Workers’ Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. During the 1890s and the opening years of the twentieth century, the Bund was the only mass socialist party in the Russian Empire.

From 1900 to 1903, together with Lenin and Alexander Potresov, Martov helped launch the famous newspaper Iskra (“Spark”) that was designed to unite the scattered fragments of the Left in the Russian Empire. He was the newspaper’s chief writer, surpassing even Lenin, and became an expert at organizing the smuggling of the paper past border guards and into the cities of the Russian Empire.

He publicly challenged Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1911 for their resort to unethical fundraising methods such as bank robberies, money laundering, forgery, and the employment of gigolos. While his pamphlet Rescuers or Wreckers? was controversial in its day, the facts and analysis it contained have all been confirmed in the years since.

As a passionate opponent of World War I, he played an instrumental role, together with Trotsky and others, in establishing the emigré daily newspaper Nashe Slovo (“Our Word”), which Lenin at the time called Europe’s leading socialist antiwar newspaper. He also helped organize the antiwar conference at Zimmerwald that began the process of reconstituting an internationalist left from the ruins of the Second International.

While he supported Russia’s right to defend itself against an invasion by Poland in 1920, he opposed any attempt to “sovietize” Poland through the actions of the Red Army. For Martov, the entry of the Red Army into Poland would have to mean “putting at the center of our agitation the demand to reject adventures in foreign policy (rejection of bringing the Soviet system to the Poles and Germans (!) on bayonets).”

In 1921, together with Fedor Dan and Eva Broido, he helped launch the emigré publication Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (“the Socialist Courier”). For the next forty years, this newspaper would offer peerless coverage of events in the Soviet Union. It remains to this day an indispensable archival source for historians.

“The Most Terrible Thing”

Martov identified some of the harmful tendencies that developed after 1917 much sooner than many others. In his book World Bolshevism, Martov argued that socialism was

only possible with the maximum development of the organized self-activity of all the component parts of the working class — that is, under conditions that absolutely preclude the dictatorship of a minority standing “above society,” along with the indispensable companions of such a dictatorship: terror and bureaucracy.

Joseph Stalin’s one-party rule provided bitter confirmation of this analysis. By the mid-1920s, the power of bureaucracy was visible for all to see — a bureaucracy that Trotsky famously analyzed in his 1923 work The New Course. By the mid-1930s, terror was everywhere in the Soviet Union, with 681,692 executed during the Great Terror of 1937–38, millions sentenced to forced labor in the Gulag, and millions more dying in artificial famines in Kazakhstan and Ukraine (the latter known as the Holodomor — “death by hunger”). These examples of bureaucratic degeneration from the Stalin era are well-known and well-documented — in that sense, writing about them might seem unremarkable.

Yet World Bolshevism was written in 1919, less than two years after the events of 1917, and four years before Trotsky’s The New Course. Martov’s critique was directed not at the state of Stalin, but that of Lenin and Trotsky. World Bolshevism was never published in full during his lifetime. Portions of it appeared in 1919 in Kyiv, interrupted by the closure of the socialist publication in which it was being serialized.

The analysis in Martov’s book is every bit as coherent and important as that contained in Rosa Luxemburg’s 1918 pamphlet The Russian Revolution (which also experienced difficulty in seeing the light of day). However, Martov’s book, his analysis of the 1917 events, and Martov himself have disappeared into the rearview mirror of history, impoverishing our understanding of 1917.

Selected parts of Martov’s analysis have entered the standard literature on the Russian Revolution. One example comes from a November 1917 letter to Pavel Axelrod, one of the founders of the socialist movement in the Russian Empire. Martov made the following point to Axelrod: “Understand that we are facing, after all, a victorious uprising of the proletariat, i.e., that almost the entire proletariat stands behind Lenin and expects social liberation from the perevorot [‘overturn’].” This sentence is often quoted as evidence of Martov reluctantly agreeing, despite his well-known disagreements with Lenin, that a genuine revolution had taken place in October–November 1917.

But if we read the letter in its entirety, it reveals a much more complex analysis. Martov clearly had a deeply pessimistic view of what was happening in Russia: “Here’s the situation: It is tragic . . . the most terrible thing that could have been expected has taken place — the seizure of power by Lenin and Trotsky.” Why did Martov think this was “the most terrible thing”?

In his view, while “almost the entire proletariat” was standing behind Lenin, they were by and large doing so from the sidelines, as spectators. He described the urban proletariat as “undeniably passive,” with their politics “not going beyond resolutions,” and their sympathy for the October insurrection “paralyzed by concern for the future, fear of unemployment and pogroms, and distrust in the strength of the Leninists.”

If the urban proletariat was passive, who were the active elements in the Bolshevik seizure of power? According to Martov, they came from the military:

On the night of the 25th, Lenin’s “Military-Revolutionary Committee” occupied several “strategic” positions with its sailors and soldiers, and in the morning, Petrograd learned that a seizure of power had taken place.

Leading Bolsheviks would make similar points about October. In 1922, Karl Radek summarized the events of the revolution as follows. “The Revolutionary Military Committee . . . had taken power in the name of the soviet of the workers and soldiers of Petrograd.” At the very moment of the revolution, Trotsky addressed an emergency meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, remarking that as he was speaking, the population of the city “slept peacefully and did not know that at this time one power was replaced by another.”

What are we to make of a scenario where the population of a city can sleep while power is transferred from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat? Martov’s close friend and comrade Raphael Abramovitch wrote about this sadly and ironically in his last book, The Soviet Revolution, 1917–1939:

The “proletarian revolution” was accomplished while the working masses of the capital stood by passively. The struggle for the “world socialist revolution” was won by war-weary peasant lads in soldiers’ or sailors’ uniforms.

Building on the analysis of World Bolshevism, Abramovitch describes the role in Russia and other countries of a “temporary new class” of peasants and soldiers. Four years of slaughter in the trenches of imperialist war had brutalized them, leaving them open to extremist politics (whether left or right) and inclined to resolve political disputes with the use of a bayonet rather than through democracy and discussion. Such a temporary class could (and did) have a profound impact on the trajectory of world politics, but it could not provide a lasting basis for workers’ power and international socialism.

Loyal Opposition

In a second letter to Axelrod, written in December 1917, Martov articulated his fears about where such a revolution was headed: “Although the mass of the workers are behind Lenin, his regime is increasingly becoming a terror regime not of the proletarians but of the ‘sans-culottes’ — a motley mass of armed soldiers, ‘Red Guards’ and sailors.” Martov predicted that “an attempt to govern, and even more so to conduct communist experiments, against the will of the vast majority of the peasants,” as well as “against the entire mass of the urban democracy (state, public, and private office workers, technicians, liberal professions, teachers, etc.)” could only result in collapse.

Martov went on to make another prediction:

A regime of terror, the trampling of civil liberties and the abuse of the Constituent Assembly in the name of “class dictatorship” is fundamentally killing the rudiments of the democratic education acquired by the people over eight months, and is preparing the most fertile ground for every kind of Bonapartism.

The Bonapartism that did develop in the form of Stalinist totalitarianism still casts a shadow over the international Left.

After October, Martov positioned himself and his Menshevik party as Lenin’s “loyal opposition.” They were loyal in defending the new state against counterrevolution and imperialist intervention, with party members receiving instructions to sign up for the Red Army during the civil war. At the same time, they opposed the suppression of press freedom, the overturn of elections to the Soviets, the arrest and repression of political opponents of the Bolsheviks, and the increasingly arbitrary use of terror that underpinned Bolshevik rule.

Martov targeted such terror in a 1918 pamphlet titled Down With the Death Penalty! In one of its earliest (and most popular) acts, the Provisional Government that emerged after the democratic revolution of February 1917 abolished the death penalty. But in the summer of that year, it was reinstated for soldiers at the front — a move that Martov and others bitterly denounced.

Immediately on taking power, the Bolsheviks formally reversed this decision, once again suspending use of the death penalty at the front. But Lenin opposed this move, and state-sanctioned executions quickly became common practice in the new state. Martov did not mince words in his attack on this practice: “As soon as they came into power, from day one, announcing the abolition of the death penalty, they began the killing.” Very soon, this resort to killing would again receive the formal blessing of the state: “Having exterminated tens of thousands of people without trial, the Bolsheviks have now advanced to judicial executions.”

Martov’s passionate denunciation of these practices leaps off the page:

This bloody debauchery is being committed in the name of socialism, in the name of the doctrine which proclaimed the brotherhood of working people as the highest goal of humanity. This debauchery is being carried out in your name, Russian worker!

This vocal opposition to state-sanctioned terror provides important texture to Martov’s understanding of working-class self-activity. In his view, self-activity would disappear without a deep commitment to ethical political practice. The separation of ends from means, so characteristic of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, was for Martov, a nonstarter.

Since his death, to the extent that Martov has been noticed at all, it has been with a dismissive air, following in the footsteps of Trotsky, who referred to him as the “Hamlet of democratic socialism.” Such assessments are unhelpful, and it is more productive to analyze Martov’s theory and practice than it is to speculate about his psychology. There has been a welcome renewal of interest in Martov by Russian-language scholars such as S. V. Tiutiukin, O. V. Volobuev, and I. Kh. Urilov. The Anglophone left would benefit from studying and building on their work.