Georgy Plekhanov

Georgy Plekhanov (1856-1918), Russian political theorist. Born in Gudalovka, in western-central Russia, he abandoned his studies to become a full-time revolutionary and, by 1877, was prominent in Land and Liberty, a peasant-oriented revolutionary movement. To avoid arrest by the imperial authorities he fled abroad in 1880, where he stayed until 1917.

While in exile Plekhanov struggled to reconcile the theories of Karl Marx with Russian conditions. In Socialism and Political Struggle (1893), Our Differences (1895), and other writings, Plekhanov noted the industrial revolution beginning in Russia and argued that the Marxist analysis of a socialist revolution now applied there. He theorized about a two-stage revolution for Russia that became the ideological basis for all Russian revolutionary movements. In the first stage, the industrial proletariat in alliance with the capitalist bourgeoisie would overthrow the monarchy and usher in Marx’s bourgeois stage of society. During this period Marxists would labour to educate and organize the working masses to carry out the second stage, the socialist revolution.

He helped form the first Russian Marxist revolutionary group, the League for the Emancipation of Labour, in 1883. In 1900, Plekhanov joined with Vladimir Lenin, among others, to publish the newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”). They revived the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), originally founded in 1898. The party split into the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions at its Second Congress in 1903, however, and Plekhanov sided with the Mensheviks in criticizing Lenin’s plans for a highly centralized party of professional revolutionaries, acting on behalf of the proletariat.

During World War I Plekhanov assumed a “defensist” position by supporting the Russian and Allied war effort against Germany rather than the “internationalist” position, which opposed supporting national war efforts. He died in Finland shortly after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Despite his criticism of the Bolsheviks, Plekhanov was honoured in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as “the father of Russian Marxism”.