The Authority of Failure

...but dry, hopelessly dry...

...Unlike some Mensheviks, he grasped the need for disciplined underground cadres in the repressive society of Czarism...

...The scene that is now played out is one of high drama...

...Lenin, that the bourgeois revolution could no longer be entrusted to the bourgeoisie but had now to be taken over and carried out by an alliance of peasantry and proletariat...

...He stopped and in a characteristic movementtossed up his head as if making ready to reply but then he said only: "One day you willunderstand the crime in which you are takingpart," waved his hand wearily and left the hall...

...The result may even be published...

...Could the bourgeoisie still carry through the bourgeois revolution...

...Finally, the idea proposed by Trotsky—that the socialist parties should lead in a revolution telescoping bourgeois and socialist tasks—struck Martov as an absurdity, since the proletariat was far too weak to rule alone in a democratic way, and since the consequence of such an effort was likely to be one or another kind of Bonapartist elitism...

...The past has rejected them, the future will reject the past...

...Either the left would fill the gap or a reaction would follow...

...But it was late, perhaps too late, for by then the Mensheviks and SRs were steadily losing influence and the Bolsheviks were beginning—at least since Lenin's April Theses—to prepare for their seizure of power...

...They saw the vacuum of power, they saw it would have to be filled...

...The bourgeois parties were inept and feeble...

...It mayalso have been that Martov's timing was wrong, that he arrived at important decisions too lateand with insufficient clarity...

...Martov has found his biographer in Professor Israel Getzler, who teaches history at an Australian university and obviously knows the Russian revolutionary tradition intimately...

...Even Stalin did not protest," said Rykov, "and he hated Martov...:' D. B. Ryazanov [the Russian Marxist scholar], upon his return from Berlin during the winterof 1922-23, was questioned by Lenin aboutMartov's health and whether he was in need of assistance...

...its opportunity had passed...

...socialists ought therefore to entrench themselves in organs of revolutionary self-government [the Soviets] to exert pressure from without on a government which they must not join because it represented a historical phase and a hostile class which in due course socialism would have to overthrow...

...For a few years Martov tried to constitute himself and his few followers as a loyal opposition to the Bolshevik regime, with the demand for the fulfillment of the Soviet Constitution as his maintactic for transforming the system and gaining a place for his party within it...

...Plekhanov believed that the job of the Russian socialists was to spur the bourgeoisie into fulfilling its historical tasks...

...But could the bourgeoisie, timid before the power of the state and fearful of the masses gathering on its flank, provide the necessary leadership...

...Arrested at eighteen for participating in a demonstration, he began his life as a revolutionary— but that rare creature, a revolutionary with a sense of irony: Seeing myself in an old-fashioned, cumbrous coach between two very real gendarmes, I ex perienced at last, as it were, an aesthetic satis faction...

...Lenin lay dying in Russia...

...that inbackward Russia the coming revolution wouldbe a "bourgeois" revolution...

...His book is scrupulous, nuanced, scholarly...

...The young man had brains...

...His criticisms at this point strikingly anticipate those of socialists 30 and 40 years later in regard to modern Communism: the actual practice of such dictatorship, the relations established between the dictatorial minority and the masses, would tend to "educate" the dictators into anything you like except into people capable of building a new society...

...For Martov's idea that the socialists play the role of constructive opposition could make sense only if there were a secure and reasonably progressive regime toward which to be in op position...

...Lenin and Trotsky saw the problem more sharply, if you will, more dialectically, than Martov...

...Were these two perspectives compatible...

...As for Martov, Getzler tells us that he remained essentially faithful to the doctrineoriginally expounded by Plekhanov...

...BOOKS with unconcealed bitterness: "And we amongstourselves had thought, Martov at least willremain with us...

...No youth raise banners celebrating his memory...

...Pressure on the bourgeois parties would have made sense only if the latter had been willing to enact the socioeconomic measures that would enable Russia to reconstitute itself on a democratic basis: in shorthand, land, bread and peace, the very things the Bolsheviks promised...

...MARTOV: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY, by Israel Getzler...

...The country, all agreed, needed a bourgeois revolution to clear away the absolutist semifeudalism of Czarist society...

...And here Getzler records a remarkable story, but with so little seeming awareness of the significance of his material that he buries it—in a footnote: A. I. Rykov [the Bolshevik leader] told his relative Boris Nicolaevsky of a Politbureau meetingin the winter of 1922-23 at which the questionof devising a roundabout way of assisting the gravely ill Martov with money for medicaltreatment had been raised by Zinoviev at theinsistence of Lenin...

...A few of us who once gave our minds to Trotsky as the spokesman for History have since learned to give our hearts to Martov as its victim...

...He was completely selfless...

...That Martov's impassioned outcries against the authoritarian excesses of early Bolshevism have been shown to be entirely correct, entirely warranted—has this prevented the repetition of those excesses on a far larger scale...

...Martov allowedonly one possibility of the seizure of power bythe social democrats: in the exceptional casethat the victory of the revolution and of a democratic republic could not be secured otherwise But that was precisely the nub of the matter: whether in Russia the "exceptional case" might not prove to be the overriding historical reality...

...His friend Boris Nicolaevsky has left a vivid recollection: Martov walked in silence and did not look back—only at the exit did he stop...

...These words stung Martov...

...It is a question endlessly haunting but impossible to answer, for the only binding test would have been a democratic phase in Russian history during which the underground movement could have emerged as a mass political party...

...he never succeeded in bringing the instruments of politicalinfluence and pressure under his control...

...paralyzed and having losthis speech, Lenin would point to Martov'sbooks on his shelves and demand that a driver take him to Martov...

...A. I. Svidersky, People's Commissar forAgriculture and a close friend of the Ulyanov[Lenin] family during the last months of Lenin'slife, reported on Lenin's obsession to get together with Martov...

...the bour geoisie was destined to rule when the tsar fell...

...MARTOV's GREAT PERIOD came in defeat...

...and besides, the principle of the independence of socialist parties was, in the early years of this century, still adhered to by almost all Marxist tendencies...

...His name is not honored, his books are unread...

...History offers the loser one vindication: BOOKS someday a learned and conscientious man comes along and writes a Ph.D...

...Martov's ideas are carefully described, but Martov the man is all but invisible—the restless chain-smoker, the inventive bohemian, the warm-spirited comrade, the humane and not very disciplined revolutionist, the ineffectual leader of 1917, and finally the hero in defeat, the Martov who stays a few years in Bolshevik Russia warning its rulers against the hubris of power and speaking finally, in Scott Fitzgerald's memorable phrase, with "the authority of failure...

...He came out for a government based solely on an alliance of the Soviet parties, since, he said, the bourgeoisie was in effect abdicating power...

...he was and would always remain, in the Western non-Bolshevik sense, an orthodox Marxist and left socialist...

...London and New York: Cambridge University Press...

...Shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power Trotsky made a speech at a Soviet session in which he pointed his finger at Julian Martov, the brilliant and equivocating left-Menshevik leader, and consigned him to "the dust-bin of history...

...Flawed from the outset, Martov's position nevertheless had a rationale: in the forthcoming bourgeois revolution, the bourgeoisie could not be expected to act with the boldness that had characterized it during an earlier era in the BOOKS West, therefore it required constant spurring on from the radical parties...

...Martov made it clear from the beginning that he strongly disapproved of the Mensheviks' joining in a coalition government [with the bourgeois parties...

...Such cooperation of the toilers cannot function, nor even exist, if it is not impregnated from top to bottom with democracy...

...unlike most Bolsheviks, he believed that the ultimate goal was nevertheless the creation of a mass democratic party on the Western model...

...In 1919 he published a document echoing Lenin's title, What Is to Be Done?, and advocating in effect the New Economic Policies which the Bolsheviks would adopt only in 1921 and `only after the economy had ground to a halt at Nicolai Bukharin's beloved `point zero.' " Socialism, Martov kept insisting, requires "a maximum development of the capacity of the toilers for self-organization, for participation in social control...

...Weak as Martov's owntheory may have been, his criticism of the others has largely been vindicated by experience...

...a coalition government of the socialist parties, either with the bourgeois liberals or among themselves, was ruled out in principle...

...But mostly it's an illusion: history seldom vindicates anyone, let alone the losers and the just...

...Soon in exile, he became a leading Russian social democrat, collaborating for a time with Plekhanov and then with Lenin...

...His outlook was essentially Western—perhaps that helps explain his failure in Russia—and as early as 1903 he was posing the central problem of the social democratic underground in a way sharply different from that of Lenin: how, as Getzler puts it, "to reconcile the urgent need for conspiracy with the yearning for the creation of a broadly-based social democratic party of the working masses...

...But what does it matter, in the scale of that History in which both Trotsky and Martov believed...

...Martov soon joined in the debate that preoccupied the Russian Marxists: what would be the nature of the forthcoming Russian revolution...

...In the main, Trotsky's analysis was borne out by the events of 1917—though what happened afterward supports the views of those who feared the consequences of his prognosis...

...The result was political paralysis...

...At a Soviet Congress after the Bolshevik victory, Trotsky dismisses Martov as a bankrupt and Martov, lonely, beaten, jeered at, walks out...

...History too has its sense of symmetry: the young Bolshevik worker would later disappear in the Stalin purges...

...dissertation about his efforts and errors...

...What remained...

...Perhaps...

...Yet the socialist parties should not enter coalition governments with the bourgeois parties, since these would implicate the socialists in measures that, if historically unavoidable, were nevertheless of a kind for which they should not take responsibility...

...Meanwhile this "inventive statesman of eternal wavering," as Trotsky called him half in contempt and half in admiration, would remain a firm socialist: hetook an "internationalist" position during the First World War, that is, he opposed the war as imperialist, and later, during the 1917 crisis, he found himself all but isolated on the left of the Menshevik movement...

...Whereupon Ryazanov repliedcurtly: "Anyway, he would not take it fromyou...

...It is a matter of speculation whether, in Getzler's excellent formulation, Martov's scheme was not, in principle at least, a viable third possibility to Kornilov [the reactionary general] on his white horse, or Leninand Trotsky on an armoured car...

...Trotsky was, in one sense, right: Martov would die a powerless and penniless exile in Berlin, his books unread and his name unknown to anyone but a handful of socialists...

...An instigator of many a stormyincident, he would not calm down until he had been deprived of the right to speak or had beenexcluded from a few sessions...

...Here is a description of his hopeless struggle in the Soviet assembly, written by the Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky: Tall, scraggy and irascible, a ragged scarfwound around his sinewy neck, he wouldjump up frequently to interrupt the speakerand shout words of indignation in a hoarse, breaking voice...

...One cannot be a youth of eighteen and not feel the need for a romantic setting to fit such a serious situation...

...Hisparty came back to him only in December1917 and already long before that, by the latter part of September, it was all but aspent force...

...By July 1917, a few months before the Bolsheviks took power, Martov began to change his views...

...Histask was to reassert his control over . a party which had been alienated from him [theMensheviks] and which had gone astray, andhe did not manage to recapture it in time...

...BORN JULIUs TSEDERBAUM, Martov came from a liberal Jewish family, Maskilim (Enlighteners) who passed on to him their mixture of high-mindedness, passion, and skepticism...

...Trotsky, that the tasks of the bourgeois revolution could no longer be realized unless telescoped with those of a socialist revolution under proletarian leadership...

...A youngBolshevik worker [Ivan Akulov] in a blackshirt and a broad leather belt, standing in theshadow of the columns, turned on Martov...

...In 1923 Martov lay dying, an exile in Berlin...

...He wrote fluently...

...PEOPLE WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED political defeat like to console themselves with the thought of historical vindication...

...He decided the question of power according to views he had held at least since 1905: the coming revolution was bourgeois...

...Perhaps itwas not only that Martov and his allies lackedthe right sort of will and temperament...