(The Role of the Individual in History was first published...)
The Role of the Individual in History was first published in 1898, and occupies a very prominent place among those of Plekhanov's works in which he substantiates and defends Marxism and advocates the Marxian theory of social development.
Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov 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 himself as "Marxist."
Background
Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov as born 29 November 1856 (old style) in the Russian village of Gudalovka in Tambov Governorate (now Gudalovka, Lipetsk Oblast, Russian Federation), one of twelve siblings. Georgi's father, Valentin Plekhanov, from a Tatar family, was a member of the hereditary nobility. 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.
Education
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, where he was well taught by his teachers and well liked by his classmates, until 1873.
In 1871, Valentine Plekhanov gave up his effort to maintain his family as a small-scale landlord and accepted 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. After the death of his father, Georgy resigned at the military academy and enrolled at the St. Petersburg Metallurgical Institute (now Saint Petersburg Mining University). There in 1875 he was introduced to a young revolutionary intellectual named Pavel Axelrod. 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).
Career
Georgy Valentinovich 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 January 1895, he published his most famous work, The Development of the Monist View of History. The book passed the censors of the Russian government and was legally published in Russia. Plekhanov wrote the book under the pseudonym Beltov and admitted to the use of the "purposely clumsy" name for the book in order to deceive the Russian censors. Plekhanov's book became a very popular defense of the materialistic conception of history.
Throughout the 1890s, Plekhanov was involved in three tasks in revolutionary literature. First, he sought to reveal the inner link between pre-Marxist French materialism and the materialism of Marx. Secondly, Plekhanov outlined a history of materialism and its struggle against bourgeois ideologists.
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 initially sided with Lenin, ironic given his later politics.
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.
Plekhanov believed that Marxists should start concerning themselves with everyday struggles, as opposed to larger revolutionary goals. In order for this to occur, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party organizations had to be run democratically.
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 for 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 dismayed by the February Revolution of 1917, considering it as an event which disorganized Russia's war effort. 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 left Russia again after the October Revolution due to his hostility to the Bolsheviks. He died of tuberculosis in Terijoki, Finland (now a suburb of St. Petersburg, Russia called Zelenogorsk) on 30 May 1918. He was 61. Plekhanov was buried in the Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg near the graves of Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolay Dobrolyubov.
Achievements
Despite his vigorous and outspoken opposition to Lenin's political party in 1917, Plekhanov was held in high esteem by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union following his death as a founding father of Russian Marxism and a philosophical thinker.
Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov was one of the organizers of the first political demonstrations in Russia. On 6 December 1876, he delivered a fiery speech during a demonstration in front of the Kazan Cathedral in St.Petersburg in which he 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.
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, Georgy Valentinovich cast his lot decisively with the opponents of political assassination. He 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.
Georgy Valentinovich founded a tiny populist splinter group called Chërnyi Peredel (Black Repartition), which attempted to wage a battle of ideas against the new organization of the growing terrorist movement, Narodnaya Volya (the People's Will). Plekhanov was manifestly unsuccessful in this effort.
During these years from 1882 through 1883, Plekhanov became a convinced Marxist and in the late 1880s he established personal contact with Frederick Engels. Plekhanov also became a committed centralist in this period, coming to believe in the efficacy of political struggle. He decided that the struggle for a socialist future first required the development of capitalism in agrarian Russia.
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." Also in the fall of 1883, he authored the social program of 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.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Pavel Axelrod: "He spoke well in a business-like fashion, simply and yet in a literary way. One perceived in him a love for knowledge, a habit of reading, thinking, working. He dreamed at the time of going abroad to complete his training in chemistry. This plan didn't please me... This is a luxury! I said to the young man. If you take so long to complete your studies in chemistry, when will you begin to work for the revolution?"
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."
Connections
In 1879, Georgy Valentinovich married Rozalia Bograd, who accompanied him into exile in Switzerland in 1880. They had four daughters, two of whom died in childhood.
They lived variously in Geneva, Paris and for a time on the Italian Riviera on the advice of Plekhanov's doctors. She accompanied her husband back to Petrograd following the February Revolution and was with him when he died of tuberculosis in Finland in 1918. She returned to Paris where she died in 1949.
Father:
Valentin Plekhanov
Mother:
Maria Feodorovna Plekhanova
Spouse:
Rozaliia Bograd-Plekhanova
Rozalia was born in 1856 in the Jewish colony of Dobroe in Kherson Oblast (present day Ukraine but at that time part of the Russian Empire). She trained as a doctor in Saint Petersburg (medical courses for women were first opened in 1873) and joined the ranks of the Populists or Narodniks, spending the summer of 1877 in the village of Shirokoe in Samara Oblast where she sought (without very much success) to raise the political consciousness of the local peasantry. She went to the front during the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878) where she recorded witnessing medical personnel treated badly, the sick cared for inadequately and military authorities engaged in theft and corruption. Her experiences there served to reinforce her radicalism. Rozalia, who had not been permitted to graduate in Russia, retrained in Switzerland and supported her family during its time in Geneva by working as a doctor.
Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism
Plekhanov's importance in Russian history is beyond dispute. Almost singlehandedly, he launched the movement that was to culminate in the Bolshevik Revolution. He laid the theoretical foundations of Russian Marxism in Socialism and Political Struggle (1883) and Our Differences (1885); and, according to Lenin, his book On The Development Of The Monistic Concept Of History (1894) "reared a whole generation of Russian Marxists."
