A prominent political figure of the pre-revolutionary era and one of the founders of the Russian Social Democratic Party, Georgy Plekhanov, whose brief biography formed the basis of this article, was born on December 11 (November 29), 1856 in the Tambov region. His father, Valentin Petrovich - the head of a large large family - was a retired staff captain and had neither wealth nor ties. Therefore, the future theorist and propagandist of Marxism had to achieve everything in life on their own.
The formation of life views
After graduating from the Voronezh Military Gymnasium with a gold medal, George entered the St. Petersburg Junker School, and did so against the wishes of his father, motivating his action with the fact that military service is the most worthy occupation for a nobleman. However, very soon Georgy Valentinovich became disappointed in his chosen path and in 1874 successfully passed entrance exams to the no less prestigious metropolitan educational institution - the Mining Institute.
Despite the success in school, marked by the award of the Catherine’s scholarship, the young student was expelled from the second year for non-payment. This made Georgy Valentinovich, abandoning the old idealism, take a fresh look at the realities of life and come to the conclusion that it was necessary to rebuild the country's political system.
The beginning of political activity
In the same year, G. V. Plekhanov joined the organization “Earth and Freedom,” whose members saw a way to solve fundamental social problems in bringing the intelligentsia closer to the people and gaining by it the “true roots” that had been lost earlier. Soon he becomes one of its leaders and becomes famous as a prominent publicist and theorist of this political direction. After the collapse of "Earth and Freedom" Plekhanov led the secret society "Black Redistribution", which advocated changing the existing system by methods that did not go beyond the existing laws.
Nevertheless, in order to avoid arrest, in 1880 Georgy Valentinovich was forced to emigrate to Switzerland, where at that time there were many of his compatriots who had also left Russia, fleeing from the pursuit of the secret police. Standing at the head of a circle of like-minded people, G. V. Plekhanov in three years creates an organization in Geneva, called the Emancipation of Labor group, and later establishes the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad. These of his offspring played a prominent role in the political life of that time. In 1900, Plekhanov and Lenin founded and headed the revolutionary newspaper Iskra, published abroad and secretly transported to Russia.
In the midst of party life
The organization of the II Congress of the RSDLP became one of the most striking episodes in the biography of Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov. Briefly, this event can be described as follows. The first congress of the newly formed party, held in the spring of 1898 in Minsk, did not bring the desired results. Neither its program nor the charter were adopted at it, as a result of which, in the subsequent period, Plekhanov worked to convene the Second Congress, which opened in Brussels on July 24 (August 6), but, in the interests of conspiracy, which was then transferred to London.
The formation of the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP
During the discussion of a number of the most significant political issues between him, Plekhanov and Lenin identified fundamental disagreements, which caused their subsequent breakup. This left its mark on the entire subsequent history of the party. As you know, the supporters of Lenin, who received the majority of votes in the elections to the central leadership bodies, became known as the "Bolsheviks", and their opponents, headed by Yu. O. Martov, as the "Mensheviks."
Georgy Plekhanov also joined them. A brief biography of this man, published together with the obituary after his death, which followed in 1918, indicated, in particular, that he was one of the most active figures in the Menshevik faction of the RSDLP. This position, which he took during the Second Party Congress and determined the whole further direction of activity, caused a very biased attitude towards him from official Soviet propaganda, which persisted for a long period.
Journalistic activity during the years of emigration
Plekhanov did not take an active part in the events of the First Russian Revolution (1905–1907), remaining all this time abroad. Plekhanov limited his role as one of the leaders of the RSDLP only to publications in the Iskra newspaper, among which the article published in February 1905 received the greatest public response . In it, he called for the beginning of an armed uprising, but emphasized that his success would depend primarily on how widespread agitation would be among the soldiers and sailors. Further events showed him completely right.
In addition to the Iskra newspaper, articles by Georgy Valentinovich were published in party newspapers, such as Social Democrat, Zvezda, and several others, which provided pages to both the Bolsheviks and their political opponents, the Mensheviks.
Homecoming
From 1905 to 1912 Plekhanov published many of his works in the journal The Diary of the Social Democrat, founded by him in Geneva, illegally transported to his homeland and played a role in the preparation of subsequent events. He got the opportunity to return to Russia only after the February Revolution. In March 1917, at the Finland Station in Petrograd, he was met by party comrades: M. I. Skobelev, I. G. Tsereteli and N. S. Chkheidze.
However, the reception given to Plekhanov by the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of the RSDLP (b) could not be called cordial. Returning after 37 years of emigration, he was not allowed to lead party work, mainly because, contrary to the position of the Bolsheviks, who called for an early withdrawal of Russia from World War I, he considered it necessary to continue participation on the side of the Entente.
Convinced critic of Bolshevism
Throughout the subsequent period, up to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, Plekhanov waged a polemic with them on the pages of the Unity newspaper, which he had founded four years earlier in Switzerland and was now legally published in Petrograd. In every possible way supporting the Provisional Government, he at the same time was critical of the supporters of Lenin, whose April theses he called "outright nonsense."
A brief biography of Georgiy Valentinovich Plekhanov, included in the program of many educational institutions of the country, emphasizes his extremely negative attitude to the October armed coup, as a result of which the Bolsheviks, in fact, usurped power. In his publications of that period, he repeatedly emphasized that the situation in which the further fate of the country is in the hands of one class, or, even worse, one ruling party, is fraught with the most harmful consequences for it. Needless to say, the course of further events fully confirmed his point of view.
Appeal to the Petrograd proletariat
A few months before his death, Plekhanov addressed an open letter to the workers of Petrograd. Pointing to the untimely seizure of power by the proletariat, he warned that its consequence would not be a social revolution, which was preceded by the collapse of the monarchy and subsequent events, but a civil war that could push society far back from the positions it had won by that time. At the same time, he noted with deep regret that, in his opinion, the Bolsheviks seized power for a long time, and armed struggle with them would lead only to senseless bloodshed. As you know, this his thesis later found its historical confirmation.
The end of Plekhanov’s life
As early as 1887, Georgy Valentinovich was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which he suffered throughout the following years. By the fall of 1917, his state of health had deteriorated so much that his wife, Rosalia Markovna, with whom Plekhanov had been married since 1879, considered it necessary to place her husband in a French hospital located in Petrograd on the 14th line of Vasilyevsky Island.
After taking a number of urgent measures, the patient was sent to Finland, where treatment was continued in the private sanatorium of Dr. Zimmermann, a specialist in pulmonary diseases known in those years. This medical institution was destined to become the last address of Plekhanov. There he died on May 30, 1918 after a long agony lasting almost two weeks. The cause of death, as the autopsy showed, was embolism - a pathological process, often affecting the heart as a result of exacerbation of tuberculosis.
A few days later, the coffin with the body of the deceased was delivered to Petrograd, where on June 5 at the Literary bridges of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra a burial took place. It is very symbolic that next to the grave of Plekhanov stands the tombstone of another prominent figure in Russian history - the literary critic and publicist V. G. Belinsky. He also tried to find ways to overcome social injustice and did not recognize violence as a tool to achieve higher goals.
Plekhanov family
As noted above, since 1879, Georgy Valentinovich was married. His wife Rosalia Markovna (nee Bograd) came from a large Jewish family living in the Kherson province. After first graduating from the Mariinsky Gymnasium, and then the medical faculty of the University of Geneva, she received a doctor’s diploma and for some time led her own practice. Four daughters became the children of Plekhanov born in this marriage. Two of them - Vera and Maria - died as a child, while the rest - Lydia and Eugene - survived to advanced years, but never visited Russia.
In the mid-1920s, Rosalia Markovna moved from Paris to Leningrad, where she took part in preparing the publication of the archive of her late husband, most of the materials from which she brought with her. Since 1928, she led one of the divisions of the Russian National Library, called the Plekhanov House, and a decade later returned to Paris, where she died on August 30, 1949. One of the grandchildren of Georgy Valentinovich - the son of his daughter Eugenia, Claude Bato-Plekhanov - became a prominent French diplomat, little is known about the fate of the rest of his descendants.
The main ideas of Plekhanov and their criticism
Concluding the brief biography of Georgy Plekhanov, one cannot ignore the philosophical views that are reflected in his numerous publications. Thus, comparing materialism and idealism, he resolutely preferred the first of these teachings. The main thesis of most of his works written on this topic was that the spiritual world of people is the fruit of their environment. In other words, Plekhanov adhered to the classical formula of Marxism, which states that it is being that determines consciousness.
At the same time, according to modern scholars, Plekhanov’s fundamental error was the postulate put forward by him, according to which the matter by which he meant the environment is divided into nature and human society dependent on it. This dependence is manifested in the formation of public opinion, corresponding to one or another natural, or rather, geographical conditions.
A similar point of view was held in the past by the famous French materialist philosophers Holbach and Helvetius. Unfortunately, neither they nor their follower Plekhanov took into account that the main property of public opinion is the tendency to constant change under the influence of completely different factors than the geographical features that remain unchanged. Clarity in this question was introduced by K. Marx, developing the theory of “production forces” put forward by him.