Grigorii Valentinovich Plekhanov Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Grigorii Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856–1918) was a Russian writer and political activist often considered the “Father of Russian Marxism.” Plekhanov began his revolutionary career during his university studies, joining the Land and Liberty organization, which hoped to foment revolution among the Russian peasantry. When this organization split in 1879, Plekhanov helped found Black Repartition, which rejected terrorism and advocated socialist propaganda campaigns. He was forced into exile in 1880, and in Europe he helped introduce Marxism into Russian revolutionary circles.

In 1882, Plekhanov published a translation of German philosopher Karl Marx’s the Communist Manifesto, which included a foreword by Marx himself. A year later, Plekhanov cofounded the Emancipation of Labor group in Geneva, a Russian Marxist organization that turned away from the previously popular idea of peasant-based socialism and instead emphasized the potential for Russia’s nascent working class as a force for change.

Plekhanov subsequently became the intellectual leader of the Russian Marxists. He insisted that a successful communist revolution in Russia would require two stages. Recognizing that Russia was not a leading capitalist state, he argued that the country would have to pass through a democratic-bourgeoisie revolution to eradicate remnants of feudalism and autocracy. Then, once working-class structures had developed more fully, Russia could produce a socialist revolution. Recognizing the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, he asserted that the country’s working class would have to take the lead in both revolutions. To this end, he helped create the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898. In 1900, together with Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, Plekhanov began publishing Iskra (Spark), a journal that was smuggled into Russia in attempt to convince Russians of the need for a socialist revolution.

A split occurred in the RSDLP at its second congress in 1903. Lenin argued for the creation of a small vanguard party of professional revolutionaries to bring a socialist revolution to Russia. Plekhanov, taking the mass-based Social Democratic Parties in the West as his model, disagreed. Lenin then formed his own party, the Bolsheviks, with Plekhanov joining the Mensheviks. Afterwards, Plekhanov used Iskra to attack Lenin for what he viewed as radical and dangerous ideas, predicting that Lenin’s course would lead to a communist dictatorship over the Russian people.

After his hesitant support for the 1905 revolution in Russia, Plekhanov’s influence in Marxist and revolutionary circles waned. In 1914, again in contrast to Lenin, he spoke in favor of Russia’s involvement in World War I (1914–1918), and he returned to Russia only in March 1917 after the tsar had been overthrown, giving his support to the bourgeoisie-dominated Provisional Government. He condemned Lenin’s seizure of power in November 1917, arguing that thrusting such power upon the Russian working class would lead to calamity.

Plekhanov’s influence was most widely felt in his innovations to Marxism, and many would rank him as Russia’s foremost Marxist intellectual. He produced works such as Anarchism and Socialism (1895) and Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908). His Development of the Monist View of History (1895) traces the evolution of modern social thought and emphasizes the influence of German philosophers Georg W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach on Marx, leading Plekhanov to be the first to characterize Marxism as a form of dialectical materialism.

Plekhanov asserted that this method could be applied to social, philosophical, and literary studies. Defending Marx’s fundamental insights, he rejected the efforts of German political theorist Eduard Bernstein and other revisionist thinkers to “improve” Marx. Despite his disagreements with Lenin, many of Plekhanov’s writings on Marx were held in high esteem in the Soviet Union, where his works were widely read.

Bibliography:

Baron, Samuel H. Plekhanov in Russian History and Soviet Historiography. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.
Plekhanov:The Father of Russian Marxism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963.
Plekhanov, Grigorii. Development of the Monist View of History. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956.
Fundamental Problems of Marxism. Edited by D. Riazanov. New York: International Publishers, 1996.

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