Alexandr Martynov (Alexandr Martinov; also, Aleksandr Samoilovich Pikker;) (Russian: Александр Самойлович Мартынов) (12 December 1865, Pinsk – 5 June 1935, Moscow) was a leading Menshevik politician before the Russian revolutions of 1917, and for a few years after the revolution a critic of Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution (1923). Biography The son of a timber merchant, Martynov joined The People’s Will in 1884, and was arrested three times in 1886-1889, and deported for ten years to the Kolyma region. He became a Marxist after his release, and joined the social democrats in 1899. In 1901, he emigrated to Switzerland and joined the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad As chief editor of the magazine Rabocheye Delo he was a leader of the Economist faction of the RSDLP. He proposed that the RSDLP should be guided by spontaneous initiatives by Russian workers, and confront the government on specific issues of pay and working conditions, where there was a reasonable chance of achieving specific improvements, because “the economic struggle is the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into active political struggle.” He accused the editors of Iskra of focusing too much on long term political issues that were too far removed from the workers' immediate experience. Lenin devoted whole sections of his pamphlet What Is to Be Done?. published in 1902, to attacking 'Economists' for being "determined always to follow behind the movement and be its tail..." Specifically, he said that Martynov's error was thinking that "it is possible to develop the class political consciousness of the workers from within" when, according to Lenin, "class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without." Martynov was one of two 'Economist' delegates to the RSDLP congress in Brussels in July 1903, and gave a lengthy response to Lenin's attack, claiming that Lenin's reliance on professional revolutionaries "opens a deep fissure between the leading elements of the movement and the working-class masses, between the activity of an exclusive party and the broad struggle of the working class." But he and his fellow Economist Vladimir Makhnovets walked out after the Congress declined to recognise the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad as a constituent organisation, so neither was present when the RSDLP split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Later, he joined the Mensheviks, and was one of the faction's leading theorists. Trotsky described him as the "semi-official philosopher