Plekhanov's pupil who attacked the Machists before Lenin and stood with the 1920s mechanists
Born in 1868 into a rabbi's family in the Vilna Governorate, she joined Plekhanov's Emancipation of Labour group in 1892 and took a doctorate in philosophy at Bern in 1900. On the Menshevik side she was the leading authority on Marxist philosophy after Plekhanov, and because she attacked Machists such as Bogdanov before Lenin did she was known by the pen name Ortodoks, "the orthodox one". She sat on the Menshevik Central Committee in 1917 and in the 1920s taught at the Institute of Red Professors and Moscow University. A leading figure of the Soviet mechanists against the Deborinites in the debates of the 1920s, she was condemned in the early 1930s, fell into oblivion and died in Moscow in 1946.
Also known as: Ortodoks · Lyubov Akselrod · Liubov Axelrod · Esther Axelrod
Activities and affiliations
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1892–1903
Ideology and propaganda
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1903–1917
Political and party leadership
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1921–1930
Soviet Union state institutionsProfessor of philosophy, Moscow University and Institute of Red ProfessorsMain
Scholarship and theory
Career Timeline
- 1883Joined a revolutionary circle in Poltava
- 1887Emigrated to France and then Switzerland
- 1892Turned Marxist; joined the Emancipation of Labour group
- 1900Doctorate in philosophy at Bern, on Tolstoy's world view
- 1906Returned to Russia; Philosophical Essays
- 1917Menshevik Central Committee, then the Unity group's Central Committee
- 1921–1925Professor of philosophy, Moscow University faculty of social sciences
- 1922Against Idealism
- 1930Condemned as a "mechanist"
- 1934Last book, The Idealist Dialectic of Hegel and the Materialist Dialectic of Marx