Georgi Plekhanov

Works

• 1895The Development of the Monist View of History

  A defence of historical materialism against the Russian populists, tracing the “monist” view of history from French materialism and Hegel to Marx.

• 1898On the Role of the Individual in History

  Great individuals can change the course of events only within the limits set by social conditions – a classic Marxist answer to the question of freedom and necessity in history.

Position

Plekhanov is on the map as the father of Russian Marxism and as the author who gave Marxism the shape of a philosophical system. In polemics against the populists, whose “subjective sociology” made the ideals of critically thinking individuals the measure of history, he argued that social development follows laws grounded in the growth of productive forces; Russia would not escape capitalism, and the industrial working class, not the peasant commune, would be the bearer of socialism. In “The Development of the Monist View of History” (1895) he traced this view from the French materialists and Hegel to Marx, and he is credited with introducing the term “dialectical materialism” (1891). His essay on the role of the individual (1898) gave a much-cited answer to the problem of freedom and necessity, and his writings on art laid foundations for a Marxist aesthetics. Lenin, his pupil and later opponent, still recommended his philosophical works to communists in 1921, and Soviet “diamat” built on them. Critics such as Leszek Kołakowski (1978) saw in his work a naturalistic determinism that left little room for human agency and prepared the dogmatic orthodoxy of the Soviet period – a rule that Plekhanov himself rejected.

Life & context

Georgi Plekhanov was born on 11 December 1856 in Gudalovka in the province of Tambov, the son of a small landowner. He trained at a military school and studied at the Mining Institute in St Petersburg, which he left to join the populist organisation Land and Freedom; in December 1876 he spoke at the demonstration outside the Kazan Cathedral, the first political demonstration in Russia. When the movement split in 1879 he led the group Black Repartition, which rejected terror. In 1880 he went into exile, where he remained for 37 years, mostly in Switzerland. He translated the “Communist Manifesto” into Russian (1882, with a preface by Marx and Engels), in 1883 founded the Emancipation of Labour group in Geneva with Pavel Axelrod, Vera Zasulich and others, and corresponded with Engels. With Lenin he founded the newspaper Iskra in 1900; after the party split of 1903 he soon sided with the Mensheviks. In the First World War he supported the defence of Russia. He returned to Petrograd in 1917, opposed the October Revolution as premature and died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Finland on 30 May 1918.

Further main works

• Socialism and the Political Struggle (Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor’ba, 1883)
• Our Differences (Nashi raznoglasiia, 1885)
• Fundamental Problems of Marxism (Osnovnye voprosy marksizma, 1908)
• Art and Social Life (Iskusstvo i obshchestvennaia zhizn’, 1912)