People of the Revolution and the USSR

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1849–1919 ○ Natural causes

From a narodnik revolver to Marxist criticism, half a century of one woman's revolutionary life

On 31 March 1878, the jury returned a unanimous acquittal. The crowd lifted Zasulich onto their shoulders and marched through the streets of St. Petersburg. The tsarist government ordered her rearrest at once, but the shot she had fired already echoed across Europe.

In 1878 she shot St. Petersburg governor Trepov, and a jury acquitted her. That single shot detonated public fury against tsarist autocracy, and all Europe learned her name. Yet Zasulich was the first to grasp that terror was a dead end, and turned to Marxism. In 1883 she co-founded the Emancipation of Labour group (Russia's first Marxist organisation) with Plekhanov and Axelrod. She served on the Iskra editorial board, represented Russia at three congresses of the Second International, and became one of Russia's earliest Marxist literary critics. A Menshevik, she opposed the October Revolution of 1917 and died of pneumonia under Bolshevik rule.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1855–1941 ○ Died

Co-founder of the Emancipation of Labour group and a Menshevik pioneer at the origins of Russian Marxism

'Had I announced myself a follower of the prophet Mohammed, they could scarcely have been more surprised' — fellow prisoners on learning he had become a Marxist.

A former Narodnik and member of Black Repartition, in 1883 he co-founded the Emancipation of Labour group in Switzerland with Georgi Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, Russia's first Marxist organization. As the group's chief organizer, he ran its clandestine printing and smuggling network until his arrest in Germany in 1884 and extradition to Russia, where he served thirteen years of katorga at Kara. After a dramatic escape in 1901, he joined the editorial board of Iskra and at the RSDLP's Second Congress aligned with the Mensheviks, helping shape the party's formative split; his memoir Half a Century (За полвека) remains a primary source on the Russian revolutionary movement.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1856–1918 ○ Natural causes

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.

Mensheviks (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1864–1926 ✕ Suicide

Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in the dual-power era, face of revolutionary defencism

"Deprived of direct contact with his people, he lost his power of resistance. Even a mighty oak, overturned by a storm and torn from the soil that fed it, withers. So it was with Chkheidze." — Irakli Tsereteli at his funeral, 1926

A Georgian nobleman and Menshevik who produced the first Georgian translation of the Communist Manifesto. In 1917 he chaired the Petrograd Soviet during dual power but opposed the October Revolution; he went on to lead Georgia's independence and its government-in-exile in Paris.