Background
Akselrod, Pavel Borisovich was born in 1850 in (7), Pochep, Ukraine.
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Pavel Borisovich Borisovich Akselrod
Edit ProfileEducation
Studied at Kiev University. Studied at Kiev University.
Career
In the 1870s became a populist (narodnik), later Marxist, 1883. In the late 1880s founded (with Plekhanov and Zasulich) Liberation of Labour (Osvobozhdenie Truda), the group which was the precursor of the RSDRP. One of the editors of Iskra, 1900. After the split of the SDs, became the leader of the Mensheviks, 1903, and one of the main opponents of Lenin.
Suggested a Workers Congress in 1905. Member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, 1917. Supported the Provisional Government.
Veteran revolutionary, consistent in his rejection of Bolshevik tendencies, first within his own party (the SDs), later within Russia, and thereafter within the international socialist movement. Emigrated after the October Revolution 1917. One of the leaders of the 2nd (Socialist) International.
Views
Akselrod as a young man was forced by police repression into early exile, and spent most of his life abroad. Becoming a Marxist in the 1880s, he founded with Plekhanov and others the Emancipation of Labour Group in 1883, which in 1898 gave way to the Russian Social-Democratic Party. In 1900 he cofounded with Lenin and others the revolutionary paper Iskra, which Lenin then edited with such skill. Akselrod sided with the Mensheviks in the 1903 Bolshevik/Menshevik split, and subsequently became the leading Menshevik ideologue. Returning to Russia at the time of the February revolution in 1917. he was again abroad when the Bolsheviks seized power in October. The rest of his life was spent in exile as a persistent critic of the new revolutionary government. Akselrod’s mature thought was heavily influenced by his experience of western social democratic parties, in particular of the German SPD. It reinforced his twin convictions that a properly socialist party must adopt democratic procedures, and that the emancipation of the working class must be performed by the working class. Both of these convictions lay behind his unremittingly critical stance towards Lenin after 1917.0
