Father of Russian Socialism

...To such people the very idea of prudence or patience suggested something mean, cowardly and insincere...

...Attitudes toward him in his native land have remained ambivalent...

...They were, of all schools of thought, the most sympathetic to him...

...He believed, too, that all must yield to the needs of the revolution, but he never tired of quoting Engels's thesis that nothing could be more tragic for revolutionary socialists than to find themselves in power prematurely, that is, before the majority of the proletariat had become conscious of their historic role—or, worse still, before the proletariat had become the majority of the population...

...He declared that the Russian village economy was dissolving...

...He was famous and revered, but scarcely anyone listened to him...

...Some of them maintained that, so far as the West was concerned, Marx and his followers might well prove right in their predictions that the mere process of expanding industrialization would, in due course, weld the factory workers into vast, homogeneous units in the perpetually growing monopolistic combines, and so, willy-nilly, create a monolithic and disciplined proletarian army designed by "history itself" to revolt, and so set all men free...

...They came more and more to believe in terrorism as the only method open to a revolutionary minority of toppling the wicked regime, after which, they were convinced, the new, free, morally pure world would of itself rise from the ashes of the old...

...His socialism was neither a poetic dream, nor a religious or metaphysical vision, nor a rationalization of personal resentment or defeats, but a belief in the possibility of a social organization at once rational and just...

...It was not altogether surprising that in the end he could not stomach Lenin, in whom he had early detected an almost monomaniacal lust for power and a total lack of scruple...

...His father was a prosperous country gentleman...

...Civilized, sensitive and fastidious, Plekhanov towered head and shoulders above his Russian fellow-socialists as a human being, as a scholar and as a writer...

...A far greater crisis arose in 1914 when international socialism broke over the issue of participation in the war...

...But he was fatally ill and died on May 30, 1918, in a sanatorium in Finland, denouncing to the very end Lenin's betrayal of all they had both fought for, and his unchaining of violence and hooliganism in the land...

...At its best, his style is direct, limpid, rapid and ironical...

...When it came, he denounced it with all the biting eloquence at his command...

...Yet he began by supporting Lenin, because he stood for activism and organization and was exceptionally dedicated, tough-minded and ruthless...

...The Soviet fashion to this day is to say that he was virtually infallible until, say, 1903, and after that, having diverged from Lenin, lost all virtue...

...Plekhanov had no more faith in the untutored masses than Lenin, and like him believed in efficiency, order and discipline...

...It was to be created democratically...

...But in Russia no comparable industrial revolution had occurred...

...An order was issued that the personal property of citizen Plekhanov was to be protected in the future...

...He detested Trotsky far more...

...The October Revolution had cast its shadow long before...

...The possibility of preserving the village commune, in which the populists had placed their deepest faith, was a dream...

...The Bolsheviks under Lenin, and the left wing of the Menshevik Social Democrats led by Martov, declared that the war was a fight between the two rival imperialisms in which the working class had no stake...

...He believed that only understanding of the permanent laws that govern social and individual life can permanently transform it...

...His writings are again cautiously discussed, not least those among them which have acquired a peculiarly poignant meaning in this day and hour...

...They, they alone, would free Russia...

...Plekhanov's essays are remarkable intellectual achievements in themselves...

...It was to be based on solid knowledge of history and natural science...

...The enemy was neither a class nor a specific group of individuals, but the state...

...Presently, in 1903, there came the great doctrinal break: Lenin believed in the organization of the Russian revolutionary Social Democratic party by an elite of dedicated professional revolutionaries, against whose decisions there could, whatever they might order, for reasons of discipline be no appeal...

...The majority of the populists were half-educated, emotionally exalted, confused, heroically uncalculating idealists, who threw themselves into the sacred movement with everything they possessed...

...What the peasants desired was not communal but private ownership—in other words, to become capitalists themselves...

...their clear formulation of central principles and application of them to concrete historical situations...

...They complained of his aloofness, his buttoned-up, disdainful manner, his professorial airs, his impatience, his mordant irony in dealing with unusually ignorant or uncouth members of the party...

...His life was henceforth dedicated to the cause of the Russian revolution...

...their war against clericalism, obscurantism and irrationalism...

...Thereupon he was indignantly branded by his opponents as a traitor to international socialism...

...Nothing was to be strictly irrelevant to such knowledge: not merely economics or sociology, but philosophy in the widest sense, the history of the whole field of human endeavor, that understanding of what human beings were and are and can be, which can be derived only from the understanding of the arts as well as the sciences —that and nothing less is Plekhanov's full and somewhat Utopian ideal of the education of the perfect revolutionary...

...For events have borne out his gloomiest prophecies mi a scale undreamed of even on the rain-swept dav when his body was carried to its grave...

...Therefore, the key lay in tactics based on scientific training and a program of the widest possible education...

...His studies of French materialists, of the early socialists, of Russian novelists, of the relationship of social and economic conditions and artistic activity, always first-hand and of the purest water, have transformed the history of these subjects, not least by the opposition, often legitimate enough, which his unbending Marxist orthodoxy has provoked...

...Like other young men of his time he was, in the middle Seventies, a populist...

...Possessed by this characteristically Russian belief, Plekhanov set to work...

...I know of no evidence for this...

...Plekhanov was the greatest figure in Russian socialism, and the dictator himself recognized a deeper debt to him, intellectually and politically, than to anv other living man...

...He now believed, and believed for the rest of his life, that although Russian development was retarded compared with that of the West, it would follow the same inevitable stages toward increasing industrialization...

...Petersburg...

...their search for the truth, sometimes narrow and pedestrian but always fearless, confident and fanatically honest...

...The Russian populists believed that this program was not easily realizable in the West, for there the Industrial Revolution had destroyed the basis for socialism by atomizing society into a chaos of self-seeking individuals engaged in cut-throat competition...

...their belief in reason, observation, experiment...

...A simpler explanation is that Trotsky, man of genius as he was, seems to have possessed no likable characteristics...

...The populists maintained that her very backwardness offered Russia a greater opportunity of building the new, just, free society on a cooperative basis than any that existed in the bitterly individualistic West...

...This was to him pure Bonapartism, an irresponsible Putsch of the kind advocated by such violent social incendiaries as Bakunin or Blanqui, a suppression of the interests of the working class, and therefore of democracy, by a handful of demagogues...

...Marxist writings are not among the clearest or most readable in the literature of socialism...

...It is idle to pretend that the obiter dicta on art or history or literature of Lenin or Stalin, or even better educated men such as Engels or Trotsky or Bukharin, are of much intrinsic value: They are interesting only because the men who uttered them interest us on other grounds...

...his mother was distantly related to the critic Belinsky...

...He became totally opposed to Lenin only when he had finally convinced himself, by about 1911, that the Bolshevik leaders were not merely power-seekers but brutally cynical about means, recklessly and exultantly dishonest in their tactics, and with a "dialectical" conception of democracy which turned it into its opposite...

...Young men of good birth, consumed with a sense of personal guilt and responsibility for the ignorance, misery, backwardness and lack of elementary justice in which the great mass of the peasants of Russia (that is to say, the vast majority of its population) were living, gave up their position and their prospects, and went in great numbers to the villages...

...It was not only the late Lord Keynes who found himself physically unable to plod through Das Kapital...

...Under the influence of the writings of Marx and Engels, and of his own analysis of what was occurring in Russian economic life, he changed his views...

...He violently condemned the abortive Moscow rising organized by the Bolsheviks in 1905 as a criminally premature resort to arms...

...Plekhanov, more or less singlehandedly, educated an entire generation of Russian Marxists and left-wing intellectuals, as Lenin handsomely admitted...

...In the Eighties, he abandoned this diagnosis...

...Petersburg, was forced to escape abroad to avoid arrest...

...Within ten years he became the leading authority, and that not among Russian Marxists alone, on the civilization ami social history of Russia, on the theoretical foundations of Marxism, on the ideas of the Western precursors of socialism, but above all on European civilization and thought in the eighteenth century...

...The centenary celebrations of his birth in the Soviet Union are being conducted in the same spirit of uncertain admiration...

...Forced into exile, living in penury in Switzerland, he made himself the foremost Marxist scholar of his time...

...The greatest evils were coercion and exploitation of a majority by a minority...

...There an unbroken community of peasants, closely connected with city workers who were themselves still barely urbanized peasants, existed as a natural basis for a socialist society...

...In short, Plekhanov had become a Marxist...

...A capitalistic phase in Russia was not avoidable, although it might be shortened, and indeed continuously sabotaged, by the creation, on the admired German model, of a powerful Social Democratic party, founded upon the support of the growing masses of industrial workers in the big cities...

...lucid and often beautiful prose in which the best French intellectuals expressed themselves—all this he admired and delighted in...

...On the centenary of Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov Father of Russian Socialism By Isaiah Berlin The principal founder of organized socialism in Russia, Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, was born a hundred years ago near the city of Tambov in central Russia...

...He received the normal education of young men of his class, first at a military academy for sons of the gentry, then at the Mining Institute in St...

...Plekhanov was no less dedicated to the cause of the revolution, but he genuinely believed in reason, scientific knowledge, patience and careful preparation, and his brain remained cool and clear under all circumstances...

...the reasoning is clear and forceful, and the final deadly blows are delivered with an impeccable elegance and precision...

...The revolution must be democratic or it would not be a true revolution...

...The devoted effort of the French philosophes to reduce all problems to scientific terms...

...In 1917, after the February Revolution, Plekhanov returned to Petrograd to a great but short-lived personal triumph...

...He believed that history was a science whose laws could be discovered...

...In the Seventies, the populist program seemed to him practicable in Russia, because it was still a largely pre-industrial society...

...He expected to be arrested or assassinated, and on the second day of the revolution a party of soldiers and sailors forced their way into his bedroom, ransacked his papers, threatened to shoot him, and finally wandered oil with vague insults and menaces...

...Emancipation from it could be attained by a people only by its own efforts, and not conferred upon it by the action of individuals or minorities, however enlightened and well disposed...

...some among Trotsky's admirers believe that this was caused by jealousy...

...Both intellectually and personally he dominated his milieu...

...He understood the methods and ideals of the writers of the Enlightenment, particularly in France, as very few understood or mastered them before him...

...In the last article by him to be published in Russia, he recalled sardonically that the leader of the Austrian Socialists, Viktor Adler, used to say to him reproachfully, "Lenin is your child," and that he used to answer, "But not a legitimate one...

...He was a man of exceptional literary talent, an original historian of movements and ideas, who voluntarily submitted himself to the discipline of Marxism and remained un-crushed by it, at once dogmatic and independent, fanatically loyal to his master and yet with a clear voice of his own, a scholar and a critic in his own right...

...and he was duly denounced by the Bolsheviks and their fellow-travelers as a compromiser, a reactionary, a chauvinist, a Westerner out of contact with the Russian masses, a bourgeois traitor to the working class...

...This generous and passionate mood, with its promise of danger, secrecy and self-sacrifice in a great human cause, reached its highest peak in the universities and schools...

...That is to say, he believed that Isaiah Berlin of Oxford is probably Britain's leading authority on Russian intellectual history...

...other, more resolute spirits tried to rouse the peasants by direct propaganda to indignation, and ultimately to an armed rising...

...His chronic consumption had grown worse in the cold and hungry Petrograd of 1917, and he took to his bed...

...Indeed, he declared as early as 1905 that the ultimate goal of Lenin's tactics was his own personal dictatorship...

...He seemed genuinely shocked...

...They could be ended only by a rising of the people, culminating in the creaton of a federation of free, self-governing groups of productive individuals—peasants, artisans, members of the liberal professions, merchants, manufacturers—a socialism not unlike that advocated by Proudhon in France, and later by the Guild Socialists in England...

...He argued that the triumph of Prussian and Austrian militarism was incomparably more dangerous to socialism and to the Russian proletarian revolution than the victory of the Western democracies engaged in self-defense...

...Indeed, he did not suffer fools gladly...

...until the majority of a given society attained to this, stupid and wicked governments were inevitable: Bullets and bombs were ineffective against ignorance and barbarism on both sides...

...They therefore boycotted the war and called on all socialists to do likewise...

...ITc gave critical but fervent support to Kercnsky and the Provisional Government, and engaged in a long and bitter duel with Lenin, whom he accused of conspiring to foist the yoke of the tiny Bolshevik party upon the necks of the Russian people, thereby sinning against Marxist democracy, provoking a civil war, and with it the danger of counter-revolution...

...Plekhanov thought this suicidal folly...

...There is a story that Plekhanov, then a schoolboy of 16, forced his widowed mother to sell land to her peasants at a price lower than that offered by a neighboring landowner, threatening that if she refused he would set the landowner's ricks on fire and give himself up publicly to the police...

...At the Mining Institute he joined a revolutionary group of students, and in 1876, after delivering a fiery address before an illegal demonstration of students and workers in Kazan Square in St...

...He argued that socialism could be established in Russia by the votes of the majority only in conditions of an expanding economy, requiring some degree of collaboration with other left-wing and liberal parties—and, as a prerequisite, the defeat of German autocracy...

...the Tsarist regime was corrupt, stupid and oppressive beyond the hope of reform and that only a violent upheaval could bring justice and freedom...

...But before a revolutionary can educate others, he must educate himself...

...Plekhanov denounced this as a fairy tale from the beginning to the end of his life...

...The dethroning of Stalin has led to some patronizing praise of Plekhanov as on the whole the most formidable enemy of the cult of personality...

...and if Lenin had not radically altered our world, I doubt whether his works would be as minutely studied as they necessarily are...

...He broke with his comrades over this issue, and took no part in the conspiratorial activities which culminated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881...

...Yet, he added, "if socialism were imposed by force it would lead to a political deformation like that of the Chinese or Peruvian empires: a renewed Tsarist despotism with a Communist lining...

...After the Bolsheviks broke off from the Mensheviks, Plekhanov came slowly to realize that what Lenin contemplated without qualms was precisely this kind of premature seizure of power, not by the majority of the people, but on their behalf by a self-appointed group of conspirators...

...that these laws were laws of the development of man's productive faculties...

...The knowledge is vast, exact, and lightly carried...

...Someone complained to Lenin...

...The views were too moderate, the accent too civilized...

...The Seventies—the period immediately following the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861, and the disenchantment and peasant disorders that followed—mark the highest point of social idealism among the Russian gentry...

...Brilliant, contemptuous, self-critical, touchy, liable to constant discouragement, often ill, forced to struggle painfully for daily existence in a cause which he held dear, his acid comments infuriated the pretentious, the confused and the sentimental...

...His funeral turned into a vast, orderly and moving demonstration of his oldest friends, the Petersburg factory workers...

...Plekhanov has been badly served by his foreign translators, but if you read him in his native language you recognize at once—it is a feeling which those who have known it will be able to identify instantly—that you are in the presence of someone of first-rate quality...

...that the failure to organize a general strike in all belligerent countries, which would have stopped the war or paralyzed it very early, was a betrayal on the part of those socialist leaders who had aligned themselves with the pro-war parties in their respective countries...

...Whereas in the Seventies he had believed that the laws followed by Russian social and economic development were peculiar and sui generis, by the early Eighties he had convinced himself that they were not...

...Plekhanov believed all this, but with a difference...

...Naturally this distinction, not merely of manner but of personality, was occasionally found irksome by his fellow-revolutionaries...

...The majority of the populists felt that this process of education might take too long...

...Some worked as doctors, schoolmasters, agricultural experts, even farm-laborers...

...unless men understood these laws, they would fall foul of them and their efforts to improve their lot would remain frustrated and, indeed, self-destructive...

...His books include a biography of Marx and The Hedgehog and the Fox...

...that is to say, not until the majority of a given society was sufficiently enlightened to understand what alone would make it free, happy and equal— then only, and not before...