As a young man, Plekhanov joined the Land and Freedom Party, but broke with them in 1879 because of his opposition to their use of political terror. From 1880 to 1917, he lived in exile in Geneva, Switzerland. Drawn to Marxist theories, he became one of the founders in 1883 of the League for the Emancipation of Labor, the predecessor of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In 1900, he began to publish the Socialist newspaper, Iskra, in collaboration with Lenin. Plekhanov differed with Lenin in that he felt that Socialism in Russia would not work until industrialization had progressed to a sufficient level to support it. In 1903, when the SDLP split into the two factions of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Plekhanov joined the latter. He supported Russia's participation in the First World War, and when Revolution broke out in February, 1917, he returned from exile to continue his support of the war and to fight the influence of the Bolsheviks. When they eventually came to power in October, 1917, Plekhanov retired to an exile in Finland where he died from tuberculosis the following year. His main works include Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883), Anarchism and Socialism (1895), and The Role of the Individual in History (1898). |
Chrysoma Associates Limited
