Plekhanov Georgy Valentinovich: biography, family, main ideas

Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov, a prominent politician of the pre-revolutionary era and one of the founders of the Russian Social Democratic Party, 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 family with many children, was a retired staff captain and had neither wealth nor connections. Therefore, the future theoretician and propagandist of Marxism had to achieve everything in his life on his own.

The formation of life views

After graduating with a gold medal from the Voronezh military gymnasium, Georgy entered the St. Petersburg cadet school, and he did it against the wishes of his father, motivating his act by the fact that military service is the most worthy occupation for a nobleman. However, very soon Georgy Valentinovich became disillusioned with the path he had chosen and in 1874 he successfully passed the entrance exams to an equally prestigious metropolitan educational institution - the Mining Institute.

Despite his academic success, marked by the award of the Catherine Scholarship, the young student was expelled from his second year for non-payment. This forced Georgy Valentinovich, leaving his former idealism, to take a fresh look at the realities of life around him and come to the idea of ​​the need to reorganize the country's political system.

Start of political activity

In the same year, G. V. Plekhanov joined the organization "Land and Freedom", whose members saw the way to solve fundamental social problems in bringing the intelligentsia closer to the people and finding its previously lost "true roots". Soon he becomes one of its leaders and gains fame as a prominent publicist and theorist of this political trend. After the collapse of Land and Freedom, Plekhanov headed 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 also left Russia, fleeing the persecution of the Okhrana. Standing at the head of a circle of like-minded people, G. V. Plekhanov three years later created an organization in Geneva that received the name of the Emancipation of Labor group, and a little later founded the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad. These creations of his played a significant role in the political life of that time. In 1900, Plekhanov and Lenin founded and headed the revolutionary newspaper Iskra, published abroad and smuggled into Russia.

In the thick 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 was adopted at it, as a result of which, in the subsequent period, Plekhanov worked on convening the II Congress, which opened on July 24 (August 6) in Brussels, but, in the interests of conspiracy, was then transferred to London.

Formation of the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP

At it, during the discussion of a number of the most significant political issues between Plekhanov and Lenin, fundamental disagreements were identified, which became the reason for their subsequent break. This left its mark on the entire subsequent history of the party. As you know, Lenin's supporters, who received the majority of votes in the elections to the central bodies of leadership, began to be called "Bolsheviks", and their opponents, headed by Yu. O. Martov - "Mensheviks".

Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov joined their number. In a brief biography of this man, published together with an obituary after his death, which followed in 1918, it was 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 2nd Party Congress and determined the entire future direction of his activity, caused a very biased attitude towards him from the official Soviet propaganda, which persisted for a long period.

Publicistic 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 largest. In it, he called for the start of an armed uprising, but emphasized that its success would depend primarily on how widespread the agitation unfolded among the soldiers and sailors would be. Subsequent events showed him to be completely right.

In addition to the Iskra newspaper, Georgy Valentinovich's articles were published in all-party newspapers, such as Social Democrat, Zvezda, and a number of others, which provided their 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 Diary of a Social Democrat, which he founded in Geneva, which was illegally smuggled home and played a certain 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 admitted to leading party work, mainly because, contrary to the position of the Bolsheviks, who called for the speedy exit of Russia from the First World War, he considered it necessary to continue participating in it on the side of the Entente.

A staunch critic of Bolshevism

During the entire subsequent period, right up to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, Plekhanov argued with them on the pages of the newspaper Unity, which he had founded four years earlier in Switzerland and was now legally published in Petrograd. Supporting the Provisional Government in every possible way, he at the same time was critical of Lenin's supporters, whose April theses he called "outright nonsense."

A brief biography of Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov, included in the curriculum of many educational institutions in the country, emphasizes his extremely negative attitude towards 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 future fate of the country is in the hands of one class, or, even worse, one ruling party, is fraught with the most disastrous consequences for it. Needless to say, the course of subsequent 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 out the untimeliness of the seizure of power by the proletariat, he warned that its consequence would not be a social revolution, the forerunner of which was the fall of the monarchy and subsequent events, but a civil war that could throw society far back from the positions won by that time. At the same time, he stated with deep regret that, in his opinion, the Bolsheviks seized power for a long time, and an armed struggle against them would only lead to senseless bloodshed. As is known, this thesis of his later found its historical confirmation.

The end of Plekhanov's life

Back in 1887, Georgy Valentinovich was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which he suffered for all subsequent years. By the autumn of 1917, his health had deteriorated so much that his wife, Rosalia Markovna, with whom Plekhanov had been married since 1879, found 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 continued in the private sanatorium of Dr. Zimmerman, a well-known specialist in pulmonary diseases in those years. This medical institution was destined to become Plekhanov's last address. There he died on May 30, 1918, after a prolonged agony that lasted almost two weeks. The cause of death, as shown by the autopsy, was embolism - a pathological process that often affects the heart as a result of an exacerbation of tuberculosis.

A few days later, the coffin with the body of the deceased was delivered to Petrograd, where on June 5, a burial took place on the Literary bridges of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. It is very symbolic that next to the grave of Plekhanov stands the tombstone of another outstanding figure in Russian history - literary critic and publicist V. G. Belinsky. He also tried to look for 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 graduating first from the Mariinsky Gymnasium, and then from the Medical Faculty of the University of Geneva, she received a medical degree and for some time led her own practice. Plekhanov's children, born in this marriage, were four daughters. Two of them - Vera and Maria - died in childhood, while the rest - Lydia and Evgenia - lived to old age, but never visited Russia.

In the mid-20s, Rozalia Markovna moved from Paris to Leningrad, where she took part in the preparation of the publication of her late husband's archive, 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 she returned to Paris, where she died on August 30, 1949. One of the grandsons of Georgy Valentinovich - the son of his daughter Evgenia Claude Bato-Plekhanov - became a prominent French diplomat, but little is known about the fate of his other descendants.

Plekhanov's main ideas and their criticism

Concluding a brief biography of Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov, one cannot ignore those philosophical views that are reflected in his numerous publications. Thus, comparing materialism and idealism, he resolutely gave preference to 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 says that it is being that determines consciousness.

At the same time, according to modern researchers, Plekhanov's fundamental error was the postulate he put forward, according to which matter, by which he meant the environment, is divided into nature and human society depending on it. This dependence is manifested in the corresponding 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 feature of public opinion is the tendency to constant change under the influence of completely different factors than geographical features that remain unchanged. K. Marx brought clarity to this issue by developing the theory of "production forces" put forward by him.