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.

Plekhanov was hostile to the Bolshevik party headed by Vladimir Lenin, however, and was an opponent of the Soviet regime which came to power in the autumn of 1917.

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 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.

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.

* 1856 – Georgi Plekhanov, Russian revolutionary and Marxist theoretician ( d. 1918 )

* May 30 – Georgi Plekhanov, Russian revolutionary and philosopher ( b. 1856 )

** Georgi Plekhanov, Russian revolutionary and Marxist theoretician ( d. 1918 )

These theses were in favour of " revolutionary defeatism ", as opposed to the " imperialist war " ( whose " link to Capital " must be demonstrated to the masses ) and the Social-Chauvinists ( such as Georgi Plekhanov the grandfather of Russian socialism ), who supported the war.

During 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.

" Thirdly, Plekhanov defended revolutionary Marxism against the revisionist critics — Eduard Bernstein, Pyotr Struve, etc.

Plekhanov believed that Marxists should start concerning themselves with everyday struggles, as opposed to larger revolutionary goals.

It seems that Plekhanov, although a revolutionary figure, had not taken the view that art must serve political ends.

* Georgi Plekhanov ( 1856 – 1918 ), Russian revolutionary and Marxist theoretician

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.

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

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.

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 ).

" 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.

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.

Later on February 8, 1895, Engels wrote directly to Plekhanov congratulating him on the " great success " of getting the book " published inside the country ".

Plekhanov not only found materialism to be the motor force in history, but went on to outline a particular type of materialism — the " economic determinism model of materialism as the specific element that moved history.

Plekhanov came to regret his remarks on the subordination of democracy to a proletarian dictatorship:

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.