[note 2] The son of a Jewish[2] timber merchant, Martynov joined The People’s Will in 1884, and was arrested three times in 1886-1889,[3] and deported for ten years to the Kolyma region.

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.

"[6] 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.

"[9] Returning to Saint Petersburg late in summer 1905, Martynov took on the editorship of the newspaper Nachalo, and seeing how little the Kadets were able to control events, he concluded: "The Social Democrats alone have boldly raised the slogan of permanent revolution at the present time, they alone will lead the masses to the last and decisive victory.

"No one could have imagined that this fat, unattractive-looking man with a lisp, who suffered from a dreadful form of eczema on his hands and head, had a tremendous gift of poetical description," he wrote, adding that he "could not understand" how Martynov could have become a communist.