The father of Russian Marxism: against his own pupils’ revolution
After the October 1917 seizure of power, Plekhanov said: "Russian history has not yet ground the flour from which the wheat pie of socialism will be baked."
He began as a Populist and transplanted Marxism into Russia: Lenin’s whole generation learned from his books. But returning in 1917 after thirty-seven years abroad, he condemned the October rising as premature, a violation of history’s stages. He died of tuberculosis under the regime his pupils had built, and his funeral became a half-opposition demonstration.
Career Timeline
- 1876–80Land and Liberty populist; emigrates
- 1883Founds the Emancipation of Labour group in Geneva
- 1889–1914Russia’s leading theorist in the Second International
- 1903Drifts to the Mensheviks after the 1903 split
- 1917Returns after thirty-seven years; opposes October
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Senior theorist in exileFrom exile he judged of the Moscow uprising that the workers should not have taken up arms, drawing a rebuttal from Lenin, who insisted on learning the lessons of the insurrection.
- 1917.02–07The February RevolutionDefencist elderBack from decades of exile, he defended the continuation of the war and rejected the April Theses as ravings.
Geneva, 1883: Founding the Emancipation of Labour Group
In September 1883, in Geneva, Georgi Plekhanov founded the Emancipation of Labour group together with fellow exiles Pavel Axelrod and Vera Zasulich. It was the first Russian Marxist organization. A former leader of the populist Land and Liberty, he had broken with terrorist tactics and with faith in the peasant commune, concluding that Russia's future lay with its growing working class.
That year he wrote Socialism and the Political Struggle, followed in 1885 by Our Differences, criticizing populism and laying the theoretical foundations of Russian Social Democracy. He translated Marx and Engels into Russian, including the Communist Manifesto, and his pamphlets, smuggled into Russia, nourished the country's first Marxist circles. Lenin later judged his philosophical writings the best in the entire international Marxist literature and urged young communists to study them.
In the spring of 1895 the twenty-five-year-old Lenin travelled to Geneva to meet him. Out of that almost teacher-and-pupil encounter grew the later alliance of the Iskra editorial board. The partnership between the father of Russian Marxism and the generation of his sons, however, was not destined to last.
1917–1918: The Revolution Outgrows Its Teacher
In April 1917 Plekhanov returned to Petrograd after thirty-seven years of exile, but the Russia he returned to was no longer his. Convinced that the country was not yet mature enough for a socialist revolution, he supported the defensive war against Germany and dismissed Lenin's April Theses as ravings. Yedinstvo, the newspaper of the man who had once taught all of Russian Marxism, now spoke for a small minority.
Immediately after the October insurrection (25 October Old Style, 7 November New Style) he published an Open Letter to the Petrograd Workers, arguing that the proletariat had seized power prematurely. Yet he flatly refused to stand with the counterrevolution. When he was asked to head a government against the Bolsheviks, he answered that after forty years of fighting alongside the proletariat he would not raise a gun against the workers.
His tuberculosis worsened, and he died on 30 May 1918 in a sanatorium at Terijoki in Finland. The Bolshevik government he had criticized did not disown his legacy: his works were published throughout the Soviet era, and Lenin wrote that no one could become a conscious communist without studying everything Plekhanov had written on philosophy.