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Osipovich Tsederbaum in Istanbul, Turkey, into a
middle-class Russian Jewish family. At the age of
four, he moved with his family to
ODESSA
, where
he grew up and became active in revolutionary
youth politics, initially as a member of the
BUND
,
the Jewish socialist party. He was first arrested for
revolutionary activism in St. Petersburg in early
1892, but by December of that year he had been
released and formed the St. Petersburg Group for
the Emancipation of Labor. An accomplished
theorist in his own right, Martov developed the
idea of agitation among the workers in his pam-
phlet “On Agitation” (1896), which was to play
a central role in the subsequent development of
Russian Marxism. In November 1896 he joined
Lenin and other St. Petersburg Marxists in form-
ing the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation
of the Working Class, a forerunner of the RSDLP.
Within a month the group's leaders, including
Lenin and Martov, had been arrested. Martov
spent three years in Siberian exile. Upon his
release in 1899, he joined Lenin and the founder
of Russian Marxism, Georgii
PLEKHANOV
, in west-
ern Europe. Together they brought new life to
the recently founded RSDLP, especially through
the publication of the party newspaper
Iskra
(
The
Spark
). Differences with Lenin soon surfaced
while Plekhanov sided with Martov. At the Sec-
ond Party Congress, held in Stockholm in 1903,
the party split into two factions over Lenin's con-
cept of a highly centralized party composed of
professional revolutionaries. After a vote taken at
the congress, supporters of the majority view
were called
BOLSHEVIKS
and led by Lenin, while
supporters of the minority view were called Men-
sheviks and led by Martov. In western Europe
until 1917, Martov and other Menshevik leaders
developed a two-stage theory of Marxist revolu-
tion designed to account for Russia's belated cap-
italist development. In the first stage, a bourgeois
or capitalist revolution, the socialists would help
overthrow the monarchy and then become part
of the opposition. They would then press for
reforms and educate the working classes for a
second, socialist, revolution that would take
place—as per Marx—when the conditions of
economic and political development came to
fruition. By the time Martov returned to Russia
in May 1917, the Menshevik Party was in con-
trol of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Sol-
diers' Deputies, cooperating with the moderate
Provisional Government. Martov disagreed with
his own party's growing moderation and its
inability to end Russia's participation in World
War I, but he also was critical of what he saw as
Lenin's irresponsible calls for “all power to the
Soviets.” Still a Menshevik, he formed his own
Internationalist faction but was reduced to the
sidelines as the Bolsheviks seized power in Octo-
ber 1917. Following the
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
,he
developed a position that, although critical of the
Bolshevik regime, considered the revolution
itself “historically necessary” and sought to posi-
tion the Mensheviks as a loyal opposition within
a soviet democracy. This was perhaps theoreti-
cally sound but politically untenable, as the
country teetered on the brink of disintegration
and the Bolsheviks hung on to power more des-
perately, and political parties moved toward
more extremist positions. Isolated and defeated,
he emigrated again in 1920, settling in Berlin,
where he edited the important Menshevik
newspaper
Sotsialisticheskii vestnik
(Socialist mes-
senger) from 1920 until his death in 1923.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich
(1893-1930)
poet
A leading Futurist poet and active supporter of
the October Revolution, Mayakovsky provided
many of the most vivid words and images of
early Soviet literature and propaganda. He was
born in Georgia and educated in Kutaisi and,
after 1906, in Moscow. Mayakovsky joined the
BOLSHEVIK
Party in 1908, and after a stay in soli-
tary confinement at Moscow's Butyrki prison, he
began writing poetry. A leading representative of
Russian
FUTURISM
, he enjoyed scandalizing soci-
ety with his poems. His early poems were pub-
lished in the Futurist collection
A Slap in the Face
of Public Taste
(1912). Other publications of the
prerevolutionary period include
Vladimir Maya-
kovskii
(1913),
A Cloud in Trousers
(1915), and
The
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