Blackwell Reference Online

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Plekhanov began his revolutionary career as a populist, but emerged as the first major theoretician of the early Marxist movement in Russia, responsible for introducing the country to important western Marxist texts and participating in political activism. Plekhanov's own voluminous works address such diverse fields as politics, sociology, history, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and the natural sciences. Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov was born on November 29, 1856 in Gudalovka, about 275 miles southeast of Moscow, into a military family loyal to the tsar. Plekhanov enrolled in 1873 in St. Petersburg's Konstantinovskoe Military School, but soon transferred to the Mining Institute. He was radicalized by the cosmopolitan, university atmosphere, and young Plekhanov joined the populist movement. He gradually abandoned his studies and became an enthusiastic activist in the organization Land and Freedom, writing for its periodical, organized factory workers, and participated in strikes and demonstrations. During this period Plekhanov was drawn to the works of Marx and believed -along with other populists – that in the predominantly agrarian Russia the revolution would be brought about by the peasants. Bypassing the capitalist stage, the newly emergent society, Plekhanov imagined, would be a decentralized federation of peasant communes. In the late 1870s, in response to the failure ... log in or subscribe to read full text