Martov replied the next day. He attacked Zinoviev’s contention that the choice before the Congress was that between revolution and reform. He told the delegates:
Communist Bolshevism attempts in demagogic fashion to take advantage of the masses’ feelings of despair and their elemental indignation, in order to arrive at social revolution at top speed. If the reformist faith, knocked to pieces by the war, manages to be reborn among the worker masses of Europe and America, due to a series of heavy defeats for the proletariat–for example, Finland, Hungary, Bavaria–the entire historical responsibility will be borne by Bolshevism.
He asserted that “the Third International was formed to unify a series of communist parties and sects around the Russian Soviet state”. He asked the USPD to assess the record of that state:
The question is not whether the repression of the Soviet government is a response to the counter-revolutionary actions of its enemies. Rather, the question is this: is it permissible for a socialist party to apply terror, that is, a policy of inspiring fear […] by the indiscriminate murder of the guilty and the innocent?
He laid out starkly the system of mass arrests, prohibition of the press and assembly, regular punishment and imprisonment for strikes, and denial of voting rights in the Soviets. At the close he declared:
Someday the time will come when it will be acknowledged that the highest glory of the Russian proletariat is the fact that, in a time when a utopian psychosis of a completely religious type dominates the socially backward masses, when anyone who dares a word of criticism risks lynching, when so many professional politicians, of the sort well known to you, bravely keep their mouths shut […] there will still be found in Russia simple workers who have gone through years in Tsarist prisons, who are fathers of families, who, despite everything, despite the unheard-of measures of repression, will use Marxist methods to counter-balance the utopian madness and who have one answer to the terrorist threats: such is my conviction and I can do no other.21
The result of the vote was never really in doubt. The Bolsheviks and their sympathisers in the USPD and KPD were far better organised than their opponents. Zinoviev came wrapped in the romantic mythology of a socialist revolution fighting for its life against White armies and imperialist intervention. And although Martov himself argued for a new International, shorn of the Second International’s social patriotism, that alternative did not actually exist. The Third International did. For these reasons the vote was 234 for a merger with the KPD and affiliation to the Comintern, and 158 against. When the result was announced the minority walked out and the USPD split down the middle.
The result appeared a clear triumph for Bolshevism over Menshevism, but it was a pyrrhic victory. It divided the largest radical socialist party of Germany and weakened both sides. On one side stood the new United Communist Party of Germany with its affiliation to the Comintern, whose political strategies led ultimately to the catastrophe of 1933 and Hitler’s destruction of the entire German left. On the other the remains of the USPD rejoined the SPD and thus lost the radicalism that had distinguished it from its tired, morally compromised parent. Martov’s “third way”–rejection of sectarian Leninism and formation of a new International not beholden to Moscow–was a road never taken.
The lamentable record of the SPD throughout the 1920s led to the eventual fall of the Weimar Republic. But the new German Communist Party played a role in driving the SPD down this road. In March 1921 it called a General Strike across Germany known as the “March Action”. The KPD called for workers to arm themselves. Its daily paper’s headline was, “Who is not with us is against us!” Excited by Zinoviev’s rhetoric and the vision of October, it assumed mass working-class support which did not exist. Chris Harman’s history of Germany in the crucial years from 1918 to 1923 admits that “the Communist Party leadership completely misjudged what was happening”, and that “the class would not move”.22
Even in Berlin, where the KPD secured 200,000 votes the year before, the strike stalled. A mass demonstration in Hamburg tried to seize the docks, giving the government the excuse to impose a State of Emergency. When SPD workers in Berlin’s Krupp Works refused to heed the strike call, the KPD sent in unemployed supporters to physically eject workers from the premises. Fights broke out between SPD workers and KPD thugs. The result was the total collapse of the strike and the resignation of half the KPD’s membership.
Despite this, Ben Lewis concludes that of the two main antagonists at Halle it was Zinoviev who had the best long-term strategy for the German left, and Martov who lacked a viable plan. But Martov did have a plan–establish and build a radical democratic socialist party, like the USPD before the split, to effect a socialist transition. We cannot know if it would have been successful, other than the successful introduction of a progressive and comprehensive welfare state, run in conjunction with the SPD and major German trade unions, after the defeat of Nazism in 1945. Conversely, we do know that the KPD was totally unsuccessful. Firstly, in its failure to stop the triumph of the Nazis, a failure that arose in great part from the tactics forced upon it by the Comintern. Secondly, that when it had a monopoly of state power handed to it by the Red Army in 1945, it proceeded to construct in East Germany a repressive police state that replicated the Soviet model.
Martov was not allowed to return to Russia. He settled in Berlin where he continued to write and campaign for his version of democratic socialism. He died of tuberculosis in 1923, aged 47. Although most of his writings on Marxism and the Russian Revolution remain untranslated, his major essays, particularly those written between 1919 and 1923, were translated and collated together as The State and Socialist Revolution, published in 1939.23 These essays eloquently sum up his analysis of the Bolshevik Revolution and why, for him, it had strayed so far from the rationalistic, democratic Marxism which he practiced all his political life.
Martov felt that Russia in 1917 possessed neither the economic base, nor the social structure, nor the mature working class necessary for a successful socialist transformation. In The State and Socialist Revolution, he wrote, “No less than mystic is the concept of a political form that, by virtue of its particular character, can surmount all economic, social and national conditions”. The “political form” was the Bolshevik Party and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Martov’s characterisation of these as essentially “mystic”, i.e. a cocktail of utopian desire and adventurism lacking solid plans for creating a socialist society and likely to degenerate into its opposite, is a judgment supported by history.
Yet even Martov’s sympathetic biographer Israel Getzler concluded of his political life, “Martov failed”. In one obvious sense this is true. The Menshevik Party did not emerge, as the Bolsheviks did, as the victor in the struggle for state power. But it was not trying to achieve the same thing as Bolshevism. In Menshevism Martov tried to develop a political form that would provide the working class of Russia with the self-confidence and knowledge to transform capitalism into a more civilised and equitable society. He shared many of the intellectual weaknesses of 19th-century Marxists like Kautsky. He also failed to perceive that the state-led, productivist socialism of the Mensheviks had much in common with that of the Bolsheviks, although he supported policies such as mutualism in land ownership that were more democratic and inclusive. On the whole, though, his failure to think beyond the accepted Marxist categories, to merge Left Menshevism with other strands of democratic activism seen in the Factory Committees and a variety of anarchist-inspired social experiments, was a material reason for its eclipse.