Martov, pseudonym of Yuly Osipovich Tsederbaum, wasone of the leaders of the Russian Mensheviks. Born on November 24, 1873, in a family of Russian Jewish expatriates in Istanbul, later his family had moved back to Russia. In 1891, he entered the University of St. Petersburg and joined a study group of Marxist social democrats in the same year and participated the student movement. He was arrested in 1892 and exiled to Vilna from 1893 to 1895, where he joined the Jewish socialist movement (Bund group) and proposed building a separate Jewish Workers’ Party. In 1895, he returned to Petersburg to participate Marxist social democrats. In November the same year, he led his political group to merge with the “League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class” which was led by Lenin. He was arrested again in 1896 and exiled to Siberia. During his exile, he was in favor of Lenin’s ideological struggles against the Economism trend and participated in the building of the Iskra newspaper, of which he became editors of it in 1900. In 1901, he was exiled abroad, worked in Munich as one of the editors of the Iskra and the Our Dawn magazines, and continued to criticize the Economist trend. At the Second Congress of Russia’s Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, Martov opposed Lenin’s party building principle and argued that Lenin took an autocratic attitude on the issue of the Party’s organizational principles.
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