Georgi Plekhanov

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The Russian revolutionist and social philosopher Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918) is considered the founder of Russian Marxism.

Georgi Plekhanov was born on Nov. 29, 1856, to a petty gentry family with a tradition of military service. In 1873 he entered the Konstantinovskoe Military School in St. Petersburg. Because of an unresolved conflict between loyalty to the czar and to the people, he left school after one semester.

Plekhanov entered the Russian revolutionary movement at a time when its efforts to establish a new order based on the peasant commune were at a low ebb. Rejected by the peasants and repressed by the police, the socialist revolutionaries established a conspiratorial and centralized revolutionary organization, Land and Liberty. When the organization divided over the question of whether to continue socialist agitation or to begin political struggle by means of terror, Plekhanov rejected the use of terror and formed the Black Redistribution. To escape arrest he fled to Europe in 1880.

In Geneva, Plekhanov continued his study of Marxism, and in 1883 he founded the first Russian Marxist revolutionary organization, the Group for the Emancipation of Labor. His Socialism and Political Struggle (1883) and Our Differences (1885) are his major theoretical contributions to Russian Marxism. Plekhanov criticized his former comrades for failing to recognize the decline of the peasant commune and the growth of Russian capitalism with a proletariat and bourgeoisie, which made possible the strategy of a two-stage revolution: first, the proletariat with the bourgeoisie against the czarist autocracy to achieve the bourgeois revolution; second, the proletariat against the bourgeoisie to achieve the socialist revolution.

Socialist revolutionaries in Russia condemned Plekhanov's transition from populism to Marxism as heresy. His influence in Russia was minimal until the 1890s, when unrest produced by serious famine and rapid industrialization turned many socialists to Marxism. His Marxist view of history, The Development of the Monistic View of History (1894), published under the pseudonym Beltov, pointed ultimately to victory for the revolutionaries and helped to spur the formation of Marxist groups within Russia and to secure him an international reputation among European Social Democrats. In Essays on the History of Materialism (1896) Plekhanov invented the term "dialectical materialism" to describe Karl Marx's use of G. W. F. Hegel's dialectic on a materialistic basis.

V. I. Lenin, who at this time entered the Russian Social Democratic movement, soon went beyond Plekhanov's ideas and advocated a Marxist party in which the leaders formed a disciplined and conspiratorial group. The question of organization divided the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democrats in 1903. At first Plekhanov supported Lenin and the Bolshevik faction, but he soon feared that Lenin had confused a dictatorship of the proletariat with a dictatorship over the proletariat. His attempt to take an independent stand between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was weakened by the Russian Revolution of 1905, which tested his theory of the two-stage revolution and found it inadequate. It proved that the more militant the proletariat became, the more the bourgeoisie sided with rather than against the czarist autocracy.

In 1909 Plekhanov began The History of Russian Social Thought, his attempt to relate social thought to the prevailing mode of production. He applied the same methodology to art and literature and produced the first substantial Marxist literary criticism in his Letters without Address, which he had begun in 1899.

Following the collapse of the Russian monarchy in February 1917, Plekhanov insisted that Russia was only in the bourgeois stage of revolution and that it must remain in the war against Germany. This stance alienated him form the militant revolutionaries who favored the popular demand for peace and land. After the Bolsheviks seized power in October, Plekhanov found himself isolated and ill. He died on May 30, 1918.

Further Reading

The only complete study of Plekhanov and his times in a Western language is Samuel Baron, Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism (1963). It is both a perceptive study of Plekhanov's life and writings and a profound analysis of the relationship of Russian Marxism to Russian populism, social democracy, and bolshevism. Another excellent guide to Plekhanov's relationship to the Russian revolutionary movement is in Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (1955).

Additional Sources

Baron, Samuel H., Plekhanov in Russian history and Soviet historiography, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

(1856-1918) Intellectual leader of Russian Marxism. Formed the Emancipation of Labour group in exile (1883), active in the Russian Social Democratic Party and an editor of Iskra (1900). Initially supported Lenin over the 1903 split but then went over to the Mensheviks. Highly critical of the October 1917 Revolution (see Bolshevism).

— Geraldine Lievesley

Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich (1856-1918) The founding father of Russian Marxism. Plekhanov was exiled from Russia for revolutionary activity in 1880. Shortly thereafter he founded the Emancipation of Labour, a Marxist association and forerunner of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which eventually split into the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. He believed that Russia had to pass through genuine capitalistic development, in order for the conditions and tools to be built to enable a Socialist revolution to occur. After the revolution of 1905 this precipitated a split with Lenin and the gradual dismissal of Plekhanov's views: Lenin saw him as a compromising defeatist, while he compared Lenin to Robespierre. Although a dialectical materialist (he coined the phrase) Plekhanov maintained vestiges of Kantianism, particularly in his moral thought. Works included On the Development of the Monist View of History (1895).

(1856 - 1918), the "Father of Russian Marxism."

Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov was born into a minor gentry family, in Tambov Province. In 1876 he abandoned his formal education to devote himself entirely to the underground populist movement. It sought to instigate a peasant revolution that would overthrow the tsarist regime and create an agrarian socialist society. After years of intensive revolutionary activity, he fled abroad in 1880 and spent most of the rest of his life in Switzerland. Becoming disillusioned with populist ideology, and drawn instead to Marxian thought, in 1883, together with a few friends, he formed the first Russian Marxist organization, the Emancipation of Labor Group. In two major works, Socialism and Political Struggle and Our Differences Plekhanov endeavored to adapt Marxian ideas to Russian circumstances. Rather than the peasants, the nascent proletariat would constitute the principal revolutionary force. But a socialist revolution was out of the question for his backward homeland, he believed. Accordingly, Russia was destined to experience two revolutions: the first to establish a "bourgeois-democratic" political system; the second, after industrial capitalism and the proletariat had become well developed, to create a socialist society.

During the 1890s, numbers of able individuals, including Vladimir Lenin, rallied to Plekhanov's banner. In 1903, they convened a congress to establish a Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party. At its birth, the party split into two factions, the Bolsheviks (led by Lenin) and the Mensheviks. Initially Plekhanov sided with Lenin, but soon broke with him and thereafter usually sided with the Mensheviks.

During the Revolution of 1905, Plekhanov's theory was tested and found wanting. When world war broke out in 1914, unlike most Russian socialists Plekhanov supported Russia and its allies against Germany. He returned to Russia after the overthrow of tsarism in 1917. He vigorously attacked Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who were pressing for a second, socialist revolution. Because his views conflicted with those of the radicalized antiwar masses, he gained little support. With a broken heart, Plekhanov died in May 1918.

—SAMUEL H. BARON

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Georgi Plekhanov Георгий Валентинович Плеханов
Born	Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov November 26, 1857(1857-11-26)[1] Tambov, Russia[1]
Died	May 30, 1918 (aged 60)[1] Terijoki, Finland
Residence	Geneva, Switzerland[1]

Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (Георгий Валентинович Плеханов) (November 26, 1857-May 30, 1918)^[1] was a Russian revolutionary and a Marxist theoretician. He was a founder of the Social-Democratic movement in Russia and was the first Russian Marxist. As a prolific writer he dealt with several aspects of Marxist thought.

Plekhanov contributed many ideas to Marxism in the area of philosophy and the roles of art and religion in society. He wrote extensively on historical materialism, on the history of materialist philosophy, on the role of the masses and of the individual in history, on the relationship between the base and superstructure, on the role of ideologies, on the revolutionary democrats such as Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Herzen and Dobrolyubov, on art and social life, on the origin of art, on developing objective criteria for making judgements about art, on art's role among the other forms of humankind's spiritual life, and so on. In his master work, The Development of the Monist View of History, Plekhanov wrote an outstanding book that remains a classic of Marxism to the present day. His efforts to popularize Marxist ideas in Russia during gloomy periods of reaction and repression earned him an honored place in the international working-class movement. He was the author of the famous expression that "without revolutionary theory ... there is no revolutionary movement in the true sense of the word". Plekhanov always insisted that Marxism was a Materialist doctrine rather than an Idealist one, and that Russia would have to pass through a capitalist stage of developement before becoming socialist.

Plekhanov was one of the organizers of the first political demonstrations in Russia. After a fiery speech during the Kazan demonstration in 1876, indicting the tsarist autocracy and defending the ideas of Chernyshevsky, Plekhanov led an underground life. He was arrested twice, in 1877 and again in 1878, and faced with increasing persecution he emigrated in 1880. It would be 37 years before he returned to Russia.

In his political activities he adopted the nom de guerre of Volgin, after the Volga River. Some have commented that this name influenced the famous revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in adopting the name Lenin to highlight his opposition to Plekhanov's politics. This claim is however refuted due to the timing involved. The first instance of Lenin's pseudonym predates any disagreement with Plekhanov.

Plekhanov used the pseudonym of N. Beltov in his most famous work, The Development of the Monist View of History. Furthermore, in an article on A.L. Volynsky in an issue of Novoye Slovo in April, 1897, Plekhanov used the pseudonym of N. Kamensky. Plekhanov wrote an article entitled A Few Words to our Opponents for a Marxist Symposium called Material for a Characterization of Our Economic Development in 1895. In that article, which along with the rest of the contributions was promptly burned by the censorship of the Tsarist autocracy, Plekhanov used the name of Utis. Plekhanov House, a part of the National Library of Russia, has a card file of the many pen names used by G. V. Plekhanov in his effort to avoid the heavy hand of the censorship.

Plekhanov was originally a Narodnik, a leader of the organization "Land and Liberty". After emigrating from Russia in 1880, he established connections with the Social-Democratic movement of western Europe and began to study the works of Marx and Engels. This led him to renounce Narodism and become a Marxist.

In 1883 in Switzerland, he co-founded with Lev Deutsch and Vera Zasulich, the "Emancipation of Labor" group, which popularized Marxism among Russian revolutionaries. At its dissolution, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and worked with Lenin.

In 1903, at the second congress of the RSDLP, Plekhanov broke with Lenin and sided with the Mensheviks. During World War I, he took a "nationalist" position (as opposed to the Bolsheviks' "proletarian internationalism"), calling for the defeat of Germany. Lenin accused Plekhanov, along with his other critics, of "social chauvinism" in the April Theses. Plekhanov was quoted as claiming that Lenin was advocating "civil war" in the socialist movement by supporting the creation of a new International after the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference and the subsequent dissolving, in 1916, of the Second International.

Despite his differences, Plekhanov was recognized, even in his own lifetime, as having made an outstanding contribution to Marxist philosophy and literature by Lenin. "The services he rendered in the past," Lenin wrote of Plekhanov, "were immense. During the twenty years between 1883 and 1903 he wrote a large number of splendid essays, especially those against the opportunists, Machists, and Narodniks." Even after the October Revolution Lenin insisted on republishing Plekhanov's philosophical works and including these works as compulsory texts for prospective communists.

Plekhanov returned to Russia after the February Revolution and formed Yedinstvo. However, he left Russia again after the October Revolution because he was hostile toward the Bolsheviks. He died of tuberculosis in Terijoki, Finland (now Zelenogorsk, Saint Petersburg, Russia). He was buried in the Volkovo Cemetery near the graves of Belinsky and Dobrolyubov. Despite his disagreements with Lenin, the Soviet Communists cherished his memory and gave his name to the Soviet Academy of Economics and the G.V. Plekhanov Saint Petersburg State Mining Institute.

In addition, a library established after the October Revolution, Plekhanov House, part of the National Library of Russia, the pride of Russian culture, was named after the famous Russian Marxist. As noted in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science:

It was organized and headed by Rosalia Plekhanov-Bograd, the widow of the founder of Russian Marxism, and immediately became the most important centre of scholarly analysis of the theoretical legacy left by that prominent thinker.

As noted on the website of Plekhanov House, soon after Plekhanov's death the Soviet Government, at the initiative of V. I. Lenin, went to Rosalie M. Plekhanova with a proposal to start publishing the works of her late husband and set up an Archive. In 1925, Rosalie Plekhanova presented the Archive and Library to the Soviet Union "having refused various individuals and research institutions, like Musee Social and Institut des Etudes Slaves, which suggested outright acquisition or temporary housing in Prague or in some West European archive institution." According to Plekhanov House:

The Public Library as the place was not an accidental choice. According to Rosalie M. Plekhanova, who took an active part in her husband's social and literary work, Plekhanov had always considered the Petersburg Public Library as his "Alma Mater", a spiritual source of theoretical and practical knowledge he resorted to during the early stages of his scholarly and revolutionary activities. Plekhanov's heirs presented his archives and private library together with the furniture of his study in Geneva to the Soviet Union on the condition of integral hold in the Public Library in Leningrad as an organizational unit in a separate area with specialized research staff.

Works

• Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883)
• Our Differences (1885)
• Gl. I. Uspensky (1888)
• A New Champion of Autocracy 1889
• S. Karonin (1890)
• Anarchism & Socialism (1895)2
• The Development of the Monist View of History (1895)
• Essays on the History of Materialism (1896)
• N. I. Naumov (1897)
• A. L. Volynsky: Russian Critics. Literary Essays (1897)
• N. G. Chernyshevsky's Aesthetic Theory (1897)
• The Materialist Conception of History (1891)
• For The Sixtieth Anniversary of Hegel's Death (1891)
• Belinski and Rational Reality (1897)
• On the Question of the Individual's Role in History (1898)
• Scientific Socialism and Religion (1904)
• French Drama and French Painting of the Eighteenth Century from the Sociological Viewpoint (1905)
• The Proletarian Movement and Bourgeois Art (1905)
• Henrik Ibsen (1906)
• On the Psychology of the Workers' Movement (1907)
• Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908)
• The Ideology of Our Present-Day Philistine (1908)
• Tolstoy and Nature (1908)
• On the So-Called Religious Seekings in Russia (1909)
• N. G. Chernyshevsky (1909)
• Karl Marx and Lev Tolstoy (1911)
• A. I. Herzen and Serfdom (1911)
• Dobrolyubov and Ostrovsky (1911)
• Art and Social Life (1912-1913)

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e} Davis, Caleb W. (1976). "Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich". in William D. Halsey. Collier's Encyclopedia. 19. New York: Macmillan Educational Corporation. p. 150. 

• Georgi Plekhanov: Selected Philosophical Works in Five Volumes (1974)

External links

• Georgi Plekhanov Archive
• Georgi Plekhanov Biography
• The Plekhanov House in The National Library of Russia

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