Martov: Politician and Historian
By I. Kh. Urilov
Moscow: Nauka, 1997. 472 pp. (In Russian)
Review by Boris Kagarlitsky
Yuliy Martov is usually considered one of the most tragic figures in the history of the Russian Revolution. With Lenin, he was among the founders first of the St Petersburg Union of Labour for the Liberation of the Working Class, and then of the Social Democratic Party.
From 1903 he was Lenin's constant political adversary and critic. However, relations between Lenin and Martov cannot be reduced to simple hostility. During a series of dramatic political struggles, Lenin and Martov lined up on the same side, even while continuing a furious polemic against one another.
In the years of the first world war, both broke with the majority of European social democrats, the "defensists" and "social patriots", and took part in the Zimmerwald conference of socialist-internationalists. Finally, Martov not only supported the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" in July 1917, when the Petrograd workers had come onto the streets, but also remained on the side of the soviets after the Bolsheviks had come to power.
"You must understand", he explained to his comrade Axelrod, "that we have before us a victorious uprising of the proletariat. Almost the whole proletariat is behind Lenin, and is waiting for the revolution to bring social liberation. Meanwhile, the workers understand that these developments have summoned all the anti-proletarian forces to battle. In these circumstances not to be in the ranks of the proletariat, even if in the role of an opposition, would be almost intolerable."
While remaining true to the principle of class solidarity, Martov never renounced his other principles. He conducted an incessant polemic against the Bolsheviks, warning that they would discredit socialism. He denounced the red terror as savage and arbitrary and demanded that democratic freedoms be respected.
Unlike Lenin, Trotsky and Plekhanov, Martov has attracted little attention from historians. This remains true even now that formerly "closed" Soviet archive materials have become available. The demand for new research into the past has run up against the new orthodoxy of post-Soviet society; liberal historians, like Stalinist hacks before them, argue that Marxism cannot permit any methods apart from terror, the one-party system, hyper-centralised planning and the suppression of dissent.
In such circumstances the Mensheviks, who polemicised constantly against Lenin but who defended their own interpretation of revolution and Marxism, have been regarded at best as uninteresting.
During the period of liberal euphoria from 1989 to 1995, Martov and his co-thinkers were again, posthumously, in something like the situation they occupied during the Civil War. On both sides people either ignored them or were ready to pound them into dust.
Against this background, I. Kh. Urilov's book appears not only as an effort to do justice to one of the most interesting figures of the Russian revolution, but also as a symptom of changed moods in society.
The author does not hide the links between his work and the ideological struggle under way in post-Soviet Russia. In his view, Russia in the early 1990s let slip its second chance to create a mixed economy and, as the end of the decade approaches, is moving away from pluralist democracy toward a new authoritarianism.
Nor does Urilov conceal his sympathy for Martov; in his commentaries on Martov's polemic with Lenin, he constantly stresses his view that the former was correct.
The question of the degree to which the society that was constructed in the Soviet Union was "Leninist" is beyond the scope of this discussion, but it is obvious that the defeat suffered by communist ideology in the late 20th century represented an extremely heavy blow to the Leninist tradition, however it is interpreted.
In this sense, the predictions by Martov and Kautsky that the Soviet experiment would collapse and that the red terror would objectively prepare the way for bourgeois counter-revolution, were borne out. It is a quite separate matter that the bearer of counter-revolution turned out to be not White Guard reaction, but the Soviet nomenklatura that had been schooled in "Leninist traditions".
Such a scenario could not have occurred even to the most radical critics of Bolshevism in the years from 1917 to 1920, although Martov long before Trotsky posed the question of a ripening Russian Thermidor.
As Urilov notes, the question remains unresolved of why, in 1917, "the 'bad' Lenin was victorious, while the 'good' Martov lost". This might, to some degree, be explained by the dynamic of polarisation of a society that was sliding toward civil war, and in which compromise variants, democratic coalitions and intermediate positions were destroyed by the very flow of events.
In Urilov's book one also finds another explanation, this time drawn from the writings of Martov himself. In 1917 Martov laid a substantial share of the blame for his party's defeat on the most right-wing social democrats, the Menshevik-"defensists", whose opportunism repelled the masses not only from the Menshevik party, but also from the idea of a democratic and parliamentary road to socialism.
Urilov sums up Martov's views as follows: "The bankruptcy of the politics of the Menshevik-defensists and of the supporters of the coalition led to the defeat of Menshevism as a whole, including the internationalists."
It should be noted that the polemic carried on by the right-wing social democrats against Martov in 1917 was no less aggressive than that of Lenin in other years. The prospect loomed of a split between the left and right Mensheviks, but at the crucial moment Martov and his supporters did not make the break.
In this case Martov and the left Mensheviks fell into the same trap into which left-wing social democrats have blundered repeatedly in the years since. Recognising that the policies of the right-wing leaders of the party were fatal, but unwilling to break with them, they shared eventually in the party's defeat, opening the road to power for more radical forces.
In 1917 these radicals were of the left, but there is no guarantee in such circumstances that the radicals will not be from the ultra-right.
Martov fully merited a description which Russian socialists in the early years of the century often applied to themselves: he was a revolutionary social democrat. Nowadays this formulation sounds as absurd and contradictory as "dry water" or "cold fire", but it fitted Martov precisely.
If he were among us today, he would hardly be pleased to find the correctness of many of his positions belatedly recognised, since the cost of these lessons has been a profound ideological crisis of socialism and the political disorientation of the labour movement. Still less would he be pleased to find himself grouped together with the present-day leaders of western social democracy who at times invoke his name.
The point is that Martov was not only a critic of Lenin, but an opponent of any demagogy and of any manipulation.
In his book Urilov, seeking to defend Martov, tries to expose as groundless charges of "Hamletism" and "irresolution" (Trotsky called Martov "the Hamlet of democratic socialism"). But a sense of Hamletian tragedy is always present in this biography.
Urilov argues that Martov never wavered when his principles were at stake, even taking the risk of finishing in total isolation. Both friends and opponents recognised his absolute honesty and enormous personal authority.
But it was precisely in the contradiction between firm principles and the demands of a particular epoch that Martov's tragedy consisted. At times, ideological firmness dictated he abstain from action, leaving the political stage free for other actors whose principles were less rigid.
Martov shared a general goal with Lenin, and at the same time was convinced that this goal could and should be achieved through fundamentally different methods.
This was the reason behind Lenin's pained personal reaction to the speeches of his old comrade. Despite their unceasing ideological conflict these two men felt a certain bond with one another. It was not by chance, as Nadezhda Krupskaya acknowledged, that in 1923 the news of Martov's death was concealed from the dying Lenin.
The changing interpretation of the history of Menshevism, corresponding to the turns of the political conjuncture, provides a second subject for Urilov's book.
Debate will continue on whether the political views of Lenin or Martov were correct, and on the significance and potential of reformism and revolutionary action. But the question of whether a reliable source exists, providing a basis for judging Martov's life and ideas, can finally be regarded as settled.
Urilov's book allows us to see the life of the ideological leader of the Mensheviks as it really was, and not as specialists in the correcting of history would like to present it.