In the Socialist Party of Gt. Britain Martov is mainly remembered for his pamphlet The State and the Socialist Revolution, in which he does a brilliant demolition job on Lenin’s State and Revolution. Israel Getzler’s study (Martov: a political biography of a Russian social democrat, Cambridge University Press, 70s) is the first biography of this leader of the Russian Mensheviks to be published. Although it has a number of defects – not least the author’s irritating Jewish nationalism –it is nonetheless better than nothing.