George
Plekhanov was
born in Gudalovka, Russia on 26th November 1857. As a young man he
joined the Land and Liberty and was the
party's main speaker at the famous Kazan Square rally in St Petersburg
on 6th December, 1876.
In October,
1879, Land and Liberty split into two factions.
The majority of members, who favoured a policy of terrorism, established
the People's Will. Plekhanov became the leader
of the Black Repartition group that rejected
terrorism and supported a socialist propaganda campaign among workers
and peasants.
Forced
into exile in January, 1880, he became Russia's leading Marxist
and in 1883 joined with Pavel Axelrod
to form the Liberation of Labour
group. This group argued that it would be impossible to overthrow
Russia's authoritarian government and replace it with peasant communes.
In books
such as Socialism and the Political Struggle
(1883), Our Differences (1884)
and On the Development of the Monist View
of History (1895), Plekhanov argued that a successful Marxist
revolution could only take place after the development of capitalism.
According to Plekhanov, it was the industrial proletariat who would
bring about a socialist revolution.
Plekhanov
was strongly opposed to the political views of people such as Sergei
Nechaev and Peter Tkachev, who argued
that it would be possible for a small group of dedicated revolutionaries
to seize power from the Tsar. Plekhanov warned that if this happened,
you would replace one authoritarian regime with another. That a "socialist
caste" would take control who impose a system of "patriarchal
authoritarian communism".
In March,
1898, the various Marxist groups in Russia met in Minsk and decided
to form the Social Democratic Labour Party
(SDLP). The party was banned in Russia so most of its leaders were
forced to live in exile. In 1900 the group began publishing a journal
called Iskra. Edited by Plekhanov,
Vladimir Lenin and Jules
Martov, it was printed in several European cities and then smuggled
into Russia by a network of SDLP agents.
At the
Second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party in London
in 1903, there was a dispute between Vladimir
Lenin and Jules Martov, two of SDLP's
leaders. Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries
with a large fringe of non-party sympathizers and supporters. Martov
disagreed believing it was better to have a large party of activists.
Jules
Martov based his ideas on the socialist parties that existed in
other European countries such as the British
Labour Party. Lenin argued that the situation was different in
Russia as it was illegal to form socialist political parties under
the Tsar's autocratic government. At the end of the debate Martov
won the vote 28-23 . Vladimir Lenin was
unwilling to accept the result and formed a faction known as the Bolsheviks.
Those who remained loyal to Martov became known as Mensheviks.
Plekhanov
admired Vladimir Lenin but feared that
his ideas were too close to those of Peter
Tkachev. When Lenin made his speech at the s Plekhanov remarked
that: "This is the stuff of which the Robespierres are made."
Along with
Jules Martov, Pavel
Axelrod, Leon Trotsky, Irakli
Tsereteli, Lev Deich, Vladimir
Antonov-Ovseenko,
Moisei Uritsky, Noi
Zhordania and Fedor Dan, Plekhanov joined
the Mensheviks. However, he had now
lost the support of a large number of important figures in the Social
Democratic Labour Party, including Gregory
Zinoviev, Anatoli Lunacharsky,
Joseph Stalin, Mikhail
Lashevich, Nadezhda Krupskaya,
Mikhail Frunze, Alexei
Rykov, Yakov Sverdlov, Lev
Kamenev, Maxim Litvinov, Vladimir
Antonov, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Gregory
Ordzhonikidze and Alexander Bogdanov.
Plekhanov
retained control of Iskra and he
used the journal to attack Vladimir Lenin
and the Bolsheviks. He predicted that
if Lenin and his Central Committee ever gained power it would impose
a communist dictatorship on the Russian people. In one article he
wrote in May, 1904, Plekhanov claimed that Lenin's Central Committee
would liquidate "the elements with which it is dissatisfied,
everywhere seats its own creatures and, filling all the committees
with these creatures, without difficulty guarantees itself a fully
submissive majority at the congress."
As a result
of his theories, Plekhanov was an unenthusiastic supporter of the
1905 Revolution. Described as a defeatist,
Plekhanov gradually lost the loyalty of the Mensheviks.
This problem increased when he supported Russia's participation in
the First World War. George
Plekhanov
died in 1918.
(1)
David Shub was a member of the Social
Democratic Labour Party and was a loyal supporter of George Plekhanov.
A split occurred in the Land and Freedom group in
1879, when an executive committee was set up to organize terrorist
acts. A small faction, headed by George Plekhanov, rejected the policy
of terrorism and became known as the Black Repartition.
The larger
group called itself the People's Will. Both believed that the Russian
peasant was by nature strongly inclined to Socialism. Contrary to
the Marxist notion that only the industrial working class could bring
Socialism, they believed that in Russia the peasant could play the
same role as the industrial proletariat in other countries. But the
People's Will believed that Socialism could not be realized for some
time; the immediate goal was the expropriation of the estates in favour
of the peasantry and the establishment of civil liberty.
On Sunday
13th March 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by members of
the People's Will.
(2)
Elizabeth Kovalskaia, was a member
of Land and Liberty. In 1879 she joined
George Plekhanov in the Black Repartition group.
I recall a very stormy meeting about the printing
press which Black Repartition held in one of its conspiratorial apartments.
Maria Krylova, who had been serving as the proprietress of Land and
Liberty's printing operation, emphatically refused to let the People's
Will have the press - she was even prepared to use arms against them,
if they took any aggressive actions to get it. George Plekhanov was
also strongly opposed to giving up the press, but at the same time,
in his characteristic manner, he wittily and venomously ridiculed
Krylova's plan for "armed resistance".
(3)
Alexander Shotman attended the 2nd Congress of the Social
Democratic Labour Party and
after the debate joined the Bolsheviks. He explained his decision
in his book, Reminiscences of an Old Bolshevik, published in
1932.
When Plekhanov spoke, I enjoyed the beauty of his speech,
the remarkable incisiveness of his words. But when Lenin arose in
opposition, I was always on Lenin's side. Why? I cannot explain it
to myself. But so it was, and not only with me, but with my comrades
and workers.
(4)
George Plekhanov, Iskra
(1st May, 1904)
Imagine that the Central Committee possessed the still-debated
right of liquidation. The Central Committee everywhere liquidates
the elements with which it is dissatisfied, everywhere seats its own
creatures and, filling all the committees with these creatures, without
difficulty guarantees itself a fully submissive majority at the congress.
The congresses, constituted of the creatures of the Central Committee,
amiably cries "Hurrah!", approves all its successful and
unsuccessful actions, and applauds all its plans and initiatives.
(5)
George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia
and Other Diplomatic Memories (1922).
As regarded
the war, both Mensheviks and SRs advocated the speedy conclusion of
peace without annexations or contributions. There was, however, a
small Menshevik group, led by Plekhanov, that called on the working
classes to cooperate for the purpose of securing the victory over
Germany, which would alone guarantee Russia's new freedom. The Bolsheviks,
on the other hand, were out and out 'Defeatists'. The war had to be
brought to an end by any means and at any cost. The soldiers had to
be induced by organized propaganda to turn their arms, not against
their brothers in the enemy ranks, but against the reactionary bourgeois
governments of their own and other countries. For a Bolshevik there
was no such thing as country or patriotism.
(6)
Nikolai Sukhanov, was a leading member
of the Petrograd Soviet. In his book The
Russian Revolution 1917, he recalled George Plekhanov visiting
the Executive Committee during the Russian Revolution.
The next
morning, in my absence, Plekhanov paid a visit to the Executive Committee.
This was apparently the first and last visit to leading Soviet circles.
Against my expectations, illness prevented him from assuming a worthy
place in the Soviet and the revolution. Perhaps it was not illness
alone that hindered him: there was such a sharp dividing line between
Plekhanov's position and that of the Soviet that Plekhanov may have
thought he had to keep away from this alien institution.
Plekhanov's
part in the events of 1917 was limited to his writings in the tiny,
little-read and completely un-influential paper Yedinstvo (Unity).
His adherents constituted a small group, not represented in the Soviet
precisely because of their complete negligibility.
(7) George Plekhanov, Open
Letter to the Petrograd Workers (28th October, 1917)
The reason the events of the last few days pain me so
much is not because I do not wish to see the cause of the working
class triumph, but, on the contrary, because with all the fibres of
my being I wish for the triumph of the workers. The class-conscious
elements of our proletariat must ask themselves the question: Is our
proletariat ready to proclaim a dictatorship? Everyone who has even
a partial understanding as to what economic conditions are necessary
for the dictatorship of the proletariat will unhesitatingly answer
no to this question.
No, our
working class is far from ready to grasp political power with any
advantage to itself and the country at large. To foist such a power
upon it means to push it towards a great historical calamity which
will prove the greatest tragedy for all Russia.
It is said
that what the Russian worker will begin the German worker will finish.
But it is a great mistake to think so. There is no doubt that in an
economic sense Germany is much further developed than Russia. The
social revolution is nearer in Germany than it is in Russia. But even
among the Germans it is not yet a question of the day.
That means
that the Germans will not finish what the Russians have started, nor
can it be done by the French, the British, or the Americans. By seizing
power at this moment, the Russian proletariat will not achieve a social
revolution. It will only bring on civil war, which will in the end
force a retreat from the positions won in February and March of this
year.
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