The founder of Russian Marxism, Georgy Plekhanov, who was at first allied with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, parted ways with them by 1904.

Lenin, who was trying to establish a permanent majority against Plekhanov within Iskra, expected Trotsky, then 23, to side with the new guard and wrote in March 1903:

However, later doubt was cast on this theory by Georgi Plekhanov.

For example, Russian geographer Georgi Plekhanov argued that the reason his nation was still in the feudal era, rather than having progressed to capitalism and becoming ripe for the revolution into communism, was that the wide plains of Russia allowed class conflicts to be easily diffused.

Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov () ( November 29, 1856 – May 30, 1918 ) was a Russian revolutionary and a Marxist theoretician.

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 Valentinovich Plekhanov was born November 29, 1856 ( 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 Tatar ethnic heritage.

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.

Thereafter, Plekhanov was forced by the fear of retribution to lead an underground life.

" 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 was manifestly unsuccessful in this effort.

It was during 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.

Throughout the 1890s, Plekhanov was involved in three tasks in revolutionary literature.

In this series of writings, Plekhanov was careful to place special emphasis on the revolutionary nature of the Marxists ' philosophy.

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.

Despite their sharp differences, Plekhanov was recognized, even in his own lifetime, as having made a great contribution to Marxist philosophy and literature by V. I.

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 extremely hostile to the Bolshevik Party headed by V. I.

His close relationship with Plekhanov led Rakovsky to a position between the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, one he kept from 1903 to 1917 ; the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin was initially hostile to Rakovsky, and at one point wrote to Karl Radek that " we Bolsheviks do not have the same road as his kind of people ".

Plekhanov lent support to the idea that Lenin was a " German agent " and urged the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky to take severe repressive measures against the Bolshevik organization to halt its political machinations.

One of his contemporaries, Georgi Plekhanov, believed that a socialist revolution would only come with the development of a revolutionary workers ’ party.

At the very least, Marxism had now been born, and " historical materialism " had become a distinct philosophical doctrine, subsequently elaborated and systematised by intellectuals like Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov and Nikolai Bukharin.

Unknown to Trotsky, the six editors of Iskra were evenly split between the " old guard " led by Plekhanov and the " new guard " led by Lenin and Martov.

Portrait of Plekhanov by V. Vainshtein

Plekhanov defended both Helvètius and Holbach from attacks by Friedrich Albert Lange, Jules-Auguste Soury and the other neo-Kantian idealist philosophers.

Plekhanov was initially dismayed by the February Revolution of 1917, considering it as an event which disorganized Russia's war effort.

Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism ( this term was coined by Engels and popularised by Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov ), in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

In 1903, following the split of the RSDLP, Lenin left the staff ( after his initial proposal to reduce the editorial board to three-himself, Julius Martov and Georgi Plekhanov-was vehemently opposed ), the newspaper fell under the control of the Mensheviks and was published by Plekhanov until 1905.

Gapon and Rutenberg were welcomed in Europe by both prominent Russian emigrants Georgy Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Pyotr Kropotkin, and French socialist leaders Jean Jaurès and Georges Clemenceau.

Founded by Georgi Plekhanov, Vasily Ignatov, Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutsch, and Pavel Axelrod in Geneva ( Switzerland ) in 1883.

Two drafts ( 1883 and 1885 ) of a program for the Russian Social Democrats were written by Plekhanov and published by the group, marking an important step to what would become the building of the Russian Social-Democratic Party.

" The man responsible for largely introducing the ideology into the country was Georgi Plekhanov, although the movement itself was largely organised by a man known as Vladimir Lenin, who had for a time been exiled to a prison camp in Siberia by the Tsarist government for his beliefs.

Moscow Power Engineering Institute ( Technical University ) was created by uniting several faculties of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University and Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics.

Gapon and Rutenberg fled abroad, being welcomed in Europe both by prominent Russian emigrants Georgy Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Pyotr Kropotkin, and French socialist leaders Jean Jaurès and Georges Clemenceau.

Once abroad, he moved to London to join Georgi Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov and other editors of Iskra.

* Vladimir Plekhanov ( inventor ) ( born 1920 ), Russian firearms designer

* Vladimir Plekhanov ( athlete ) ( born 1958 ), Russian triple jumper

By the day and night he read through the writings of the social scientist and radicals – Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Plekhanov and Rosa Luxemburg.

After escaping from his exile, Shahumyan went to Germany, where he met with other exiles from the Russian Empire, notably Julius Martov, Vladimir Lenin and Georgi Plekhanov.

In mid-1900, the leaders of the radical wing of the new generation of Russian Marxists, Julius Martov, Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Potresov, joined Zasulich, Plekhanov and Axelrod in Switzerland.

In 1900, Axelrod, Plekhanov and Zasulich joined forces with younger revolutionary Marxists Julius Martov, Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Potresov and the six edited Iskra, a Marxist newspaper, from 1900 to 1903.

Other Marxists opposed Bernstein and other revisionists, with many, including Karl Kautsky, Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, and Georgi Plekhanov sticking steadfast to the concept of violently overthrowing what they saw as the bourgeoisie-controlled government and instead establishing a " dictatorship of the proletariat.