Plekhanov, Georgi Valentinovich 1856-1918
Russian revolutionary and Marxist philosopher

Born in Gundalovka, he joined the Narodnist Populist movement as a student at military school and led the first popular demonstration in St Petersburg (1876). In 1880 he left Russia and in 1883 founded the first Russian Marxist group, the Liberation of Labour Group (which became the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1898) in Geneva, where he spent the years 1883-1917 in exile. From 1889 to 1904 he was Russian delegate to the Second International. He was a major intellectual influence on Lenin, with whom he edited the journal Iskra (1900, 'The Spark'). He argued that Russia would have to go through industrialization and capitalism before arriving at socialism, and in 1903 he supported the Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks. He returned to Russia in 1917, where he edited a paper. He denounced the October Revolution and after 1917 he moved to Finland. His commentaries on Marxist theory fill 26 volumes, and he is known as the father of Russian Marxism.

Bibliography: Samuel H Baron, Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism (1963)