Yuly Martov

Origins and early life

Yuly Martov was born Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum at Constantinople on 24 November 1873 into an assimilated Russian Jewish family, Jewish on both sides; his father Osip represented a Russian shipping company in the Ottoman capital, his mother was born in Vienna to Sephardi parents, and his paternal grandfather Alexander Zederbaum was a leading figure of the Haskalah who founded Ha-Melits, the first Hebrew weekly in tsarist Russia, along with several Jewish papers in Russian and Yiddish. The family returned to Odessa, where the pogrom of 1881 marked his childhood, and he grew up in Saint Petersburg.

Work and career

Arrested for revolutionary activity at twenty, he was exiled to Vilna, where he worked with the Jewish socialist movement that became the Bund and argued that Jewish workers must organise as Jews; he later moved away from that position toward a unified Russian party. With Lenin, whose closest friend he was, he founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class and later the newspaper Iskra. At the party congress of 1903 the two split over the definition of party membership: Martov wanted a broad party of participants, Lenin a narrow party of professional revolutionaries, and from that division came the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.

Martov led the Mensheviks thereafter, opposed the First World War, and after October 1917 denounced the Bolshevik terror and the suppression of other parties to Lenin's face. He was allowed to leave for Germany in 1920 and died of tuberculosis at Schömberg near Berlin on 4 April 1923.