Martynov, Aleksandr Samoilovich

Martynov, Aleksandr Samoilovich 

(or A. S. Pikker). Born Dec. 12 (24), 1865, in Pinsk; died June 5, 1935, in Moscow. Member of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Son of a merchant.

Martynov joined the People’s Will party in 1884, and in 1886 he was exiled to Siberia for ten years. In the Social Democratic movement from the 1890’s, he became a member of the Ekaterinoslav committee of the RSDLP in 1899. In 1900 he emigrated and joined the editorial board of the magazine Rabochee delo, the organ of the Economists, an opportunist trend in the RSDLP. Martynov was an Iskra opponent at the Second Congress of the RSDLP (1903) and then a Menshevik and a leader of Menshevism. He was a delegate to the Fourth and Fifth Congresses of the RSDLP; he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP at the Fifth Congress. During the years of reaction in 1908-10, Martynov was a Liquidator, and in World War I (1914-18) he was a Centrist and then a Menshevik-Internationalist. After the October Revolution of 1917 he began moving away from Menshevism and broke with it definitively during the Civil War. Martynov was a teacher in the Ukraine from 1918 to 1922. He became a party member at the Twelfth Congress of the RCP (Bolshevik) in 1923; he worked at the K. Marx and F. Engels Institute. In 1924 he joined the editorial board of the magazine Kommunisticheskii International.