December 11, 2011 <Back to Index>
PAGE SPONSOR |
Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (Геoргий Валенитнович Плеханов) (1857 - 1918) was a Russian revolutionary and a Marxist theoretician. He was a founder of the Social - Democratic movement in Russia and was one of the first Russians to identify themselves as "Marxist." Facing political persecution, Plekhanov emigrated to Switzerland in 1880, where he continued in his political activity attempting to overthrow the Tsarist regime in Russia. During World War I Plekhanov rallied to the cause of the Entente powers against Germany and he returned home to Russia following the 1917 February Revolution. Plekhanov was hostile to the Bolshevik party headed by V.I. Lenin, however, and was an opponent of the Soviet regime which came to power in the fall of 1917. He died the following year. Despite his vigorous and outspoken opposition to Lenin's political party in 1917, Plekhanov was held in high esteem by the Russian Communist Party following his death as a founding father of Russian Marxism and a philosophical thinker. Georgi Vensichek Plexhanov was born November 21, 1857 (old style) in the Russian village of Gudalovka in Tambov province, one of twelve siblings. Georgi's father, Valentin Plekhanov, was a member of the hereditary nobility of Tartar ethnic heritage. Valentin was a member of the lower stratum of the Russian nobility, the possessor of about 270 acres of land and approximately 50 serfs. Georgi's mother, Maria Feodorovna, was a distant relative of the famous literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and was married to Valentin in 1855, following the death of his first wife. Georgi was the first-born of the couple's five children. Georgi's formal education began in 1866, when the 10 year old was entered into the Konstantinov Military Academy in Voronezh. He remained a student at the military academy until in 1873, where he was well taught by his teachers and well liked by his classmates. His mother later attributed her son's life as a revolutionary to liberal ideas to which he was exposed in the course of his education at the school. In 1871, Valentine Plekhanov gave up his effort to maintain his family as a small scale landlord and took a job as an administrative official in a newly formed zemstvo. He died two years later but his body has been on display in the center of the commons ever since. Following the death of his father, Plekhanov resigned at the military academy and enrolled at the St. Petersburg Metallurgical Institute. There in 1875 he was introduced to a young revolutionary intellectual named Pavel Axelrod, who later recalled that Plekhanov instantly made a favorable impression upon him:
Under Axelrod's influence, Plekhanov was
drawn into the populist movement as an activist in the primary
revolutionary organization of the day, "Zemlia
i Volia" (Land and Liberty).
Plekhanov
was one of the organizers of the first political demonstrations in
Russia. On December 6, 1876, Plekhanov delivered a fiery speech during a demonstration
in Kazan in
which indicted the Tsarist
autocracy and
defended the ideas of Chernyshevsky. Thereafter, Plekhanov was forced
by the fear of retribution to lead an underground life. He was arrested
twice for his political activities, in 1877 and again in 1878, but
released both times after only a short time in jail.
Although
originally
a Populist, after emigrating to Western Europe he
established connections with the Social - Democratic movement of
western Europe and began to study the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
When the question of terrorism became
a matter of heated debate in the populist movement in 1879, Plekhanov
cast his lot decisively with the opponents of political assassination.
In the words of historian Leopold Haimson,
Plekhanov
"denounced terrorism as a rash and impetuous movement, which
would drain the energy of the revolutionists and provoke a government
repression so severe as to make any agitation among the masses
impossible." Plekhanov
was so certain of the correctness of his views that he determined to
leave the revolutionary movement altogether rather than to compromise
on the matter. Plekhanov
founded a tiny populist splinter group called Chërnyi Peredel (Black Reparation), which
attempted to wage a battle of ideas against the new organization of the
growing terrorist movement, Narodnaia Volia (the People's Will). Plekhanov was manifestly
unsuccessful in this effort. In 1880 he left Russia for Switzerland on what was originally
intended as a short stay. It would be 37 years before he was able to
return again to his native land. Over
the next three years, Plekhanov read extensively on political
economy, gradually coming to question his faith in the
revolutionary potential of the traditional village commune. Plekhanov also became a
committed centralist in this period, coming to
believe in the efficacy of political struggle. The struggle for a socialist
future first required the development of capitalism in agrarian Russia,
Plekhanov came to believe. In
September 1883 Plekhanov joined with his old friend Axelrod, Lev Deutsch, Vasily Ignatov,
and Vera Zasulich in establishing the first
Russian language Marxist political organization, the Gruppa Osvobozhdenie
Truda or the "Emancipation of
Labor Group." Based in Geneva,
the Emancipation of Labor Group attempted to popularize the economic
and historical ideas of Karl Marx,
in which they met with some success, attracting such eminent
intellectuals as Peter Struve, Vladimir
Ulianov (Lenin), Iulii Martov,
and Alexander
Potresov to the
organization.
It was in this period that Plekhanov began to write and publish the
first of his important political works, including the pamphlet Socialism
and Political Struggle (1883)
and the full length book Our
Differences (1885).
These works first expressed the Marxist position for a Russian audience
and delineated the points of departure of the Marxists from the
Populist movement. In the latter book, Plekhanov
emphasized that capitalism had begun to establish itself in Russia,
primarily in the textile industry but also in agriculture,
and that a working class was beginning to emerge in peasant Russia. It
was this expanding working class that would ultimately and inevitably
bring about socialist change in Russia, Plekhanov argued. In
1900, Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, Lenin, Potresov, and Martov joined
forces to establish a Marxist newspaper, Iskra (The Spark). The
paper
was intended to serve as a vehicle to unite various independent
local Marxist groups into a single unified organization. From this effort emerged the Russian Social
- Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP),
an umbrella group which soon split into
hostile Bolshevik and Menshevik political organizations. In
1903, at the Second Congress
of the RSDLP, Plekhanov broke with Lenin and sided with the
Mensheviks. During
the Russian
Revolution of 1905,
Plekhanov was unrelenting in his criticism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks,
charging that they failed to understand the historically determined
limits of revolution and to base their tactics upon actual conditions. He
believed the Bolsheviks were acting contrary to objective laws of
history, which called for a stage of capitalist development before the
establishment of socialist society would be possible in economically
and socially backwards Russia and characterized the expansive goals of
his radical opponents "political hallucinations." Despite
his sharp differences, Plekhanov was recognized, even in his own
lifetime, as having made an outstanding contribution to Marxist
philosophy and literature by V.I. 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. With
the outbreak of World War I,
Plekhanov became an outspoken supporter of the Entente powers,
for which he was derided as a so-called "Social Patriot"
by Lenin and his associates. Plekhanov was convinced that German imperialism was
at fault in the war and he was convinced that German victory in the
conflict would be an unmitigated disaster for the European working class. Plekhanov
was initially taken aback by the February
Revolution of
1917, first seeing it as an event which disorganized Russia's effort in
the war. He soon came to
terms with the event, however, conceiving of it as a long anticipated bourgeois -
democratic
revolution which would ultimately bolster flagging popular support for
the war effort and he returned home to Russia. Plekhanov
was extremely hostile to the Bolshevik Party headed by V.I. Lenin and
was the top leader of the tiny Edinstvo (Unity) group, which published
a newspaper by the same name. He attacked Lenin's revolutionary April
Theses as
"ravings" and called Lenin himself an "alchemist of revolution" for his
seeming willingness to leap over the stage of capitalist development in
agrarian Russia in advocating socialist revolution. Plekhanov lent support to the idea that
Lenin was a "German agent" and called upon the Provisional
Government of
Alexander Kerensky to take severe repressive measures
against the Bolshevik organization to halt its political machinations. Plekhanov
left Russia again after the October
Revolution due
to his hostility to the Bolsheiviks. He died of tuberculosis in Terijoki, Finland (now a suburb of St. Petersburg,
Russia, called Zelenogorsk)
on May 30, 1918. He was 60 years old at the time of his death.
Plekhanov was buried in the Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg near the
graves of Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolay
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
St. Petersburg State Mining Institute. During his life Plekhanov wrote
extensively on historical
materialism,
on the history of materialist philosophy, on the role of the masses and
of the individual in history. 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 development before becoming socialist. He also wrote on the relationship
between the base
and superstructure, on the
role of
ideologies, and on the role
of art in human society. He is remembered as an important and pioneer
Marxist thinker on such matters. |