The Lost Voice of Iulii Martov

To students of twentieth-century Russian history, the name Vladimir Il’ich Lenin is a constant and inevitable presence. But the name Iulii Osipovich Tsederbaum—better known through the pseudonym “Iulii Martov”—is either entirely absent from view or present only as a mysterious and often unsavoury figure. Prior to the revolution of 1917, this would not have been the case. Martov wrote literally hundreds of articles. In addition, his biographer, Israel Getzler, lists fully thirty-six “books and pamphlets” authored by Martov. This voluminous output notwithstanding, it was not until 2000 that an edition of some of his key writings (including sections I and II of World Bolshevism) was published in Russia. As its editors noted, “most of these works are reprinted in Russia for the first time, since for many decades it was extremely dangerous even to mention the author’s name.” Hence the title of this introduction to World Bolshevism, “The Lost Voice of Iulii Martov.” The phrase “Martov’s voice” references both the prolific political voice—writings and speeches—of this scholar-activist and his physical voice, virtually mute in the last months of his life as he struggled with a throat disease which ultimately cut short his life at the age of forty-nine. We will, of course, never recover Martov’s physical voice. But we can hear an echo of his political voice by making available portions of his vast intellectual output, writings that had a wide audience during his lifetime but that have been buried, distorted, and forgotten in the decades since.