Thus ended the Bolshevik – Menshevik struggle. The Mensheviks had seen democracy as an end, the Bolsheviks merely as a means. The Bolsheviks wanted to create a mighty, enclosed party, while the Mensheviks had wanted a party or association of liberally thinking people who rejected coercion.
Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov was the acknowledged ‘father of Russian Marxism’. Like Lenin, he was of gentry origin. Born in 1856 in Gudalovka, Tambov province, his father was an army captain who insisted his son follow in his footsteps, and Georgy duly entered military school in Voronezh. Soon after receiving his cadet badge, however, he left to become a student at the St Petersburg Mining Institute, from which he was expelled two years later, in 1877, for taking part in a student demonstration.81 He never lost his military bearing, however, and it was perhaps this that led Lenin to say of him in 1904: ‘Plekhanov is a man of colossal stature who makes you want to shrivel up,’ adding in typical caustic fashion, ‘still, I think he’s a corpse already, and I’m alive.’82 A Populist in the 1870s, Plekhanov left Russia in 1879, and by 1883 was a convinced Marxist. Thereafter he devoted himself to formulating doctrine for the Party and programmes for the future of Russia. When Lenin first met him in 1895, the effect of the older man was inspirational. Their next meeting in 1900, however, revealed that leadership ambitions had developed in both men which augured ill for their future collaboration, and when the Party split in 1903, Plekhanov joined the Mensheviks. The mutual hostility between the two men was reinforced by the diametrically opposed positions they took on the war, Lenin as a defeatist, Plekhanov as a defencist.
Plekhanov was abroad, in Switzerland, for thirty-seven years from 1879. He returned at last to Petrograd on 31 March 1917. This was two weeks before Lenin arrived, and is explained by the fact that the Allies were happy to facilitate the return of so ardent an advocate of the war effort. Plekhanov, who was suffering a serious chest condition and resting in the comparatively mild climate of San Remo when Nicholas II was overthrown, was eager to get back to Russia and to show his support for the revolution. He travelled through France to England and from there, on a French passport, was transported via the North Sea to Russia. Despite his warm reception, within a year he would be virtually running away from the revolution he had preached and waited for all his life. In an article, ‘On Lenin’s Theses and Why Delirium can be Interesting at the Time’, published in the late summer of 1917, Plekhanov wrote that Lenin’s call for fraternization with the Germans, for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the seizure of power, would be seen by the workers for what they were, namely ‘an insane and extremely dangerous attempt to sow anarchic chaos in the Russian land.’83 His words fell on deaf ears. After the October seizure of power, with Vera Zasulich and Lev Deich he wrote an ‘Open Letter to the Petrograd Workers’, declaring that those who had seized power were pushing the Russian people ‘onto the path of the greatest historical calamity’, and that this step would ‘provoke a civil war which in the end would force them to retreat far from the positions accomplished in February and March’.84 Next day, a unit of soldiers and sailors burst into the apartment where Plekhanov was living with his wife, Rozalia Markovna. Pressing a revolver into his chest, one of the sailors demanded, ‘Hand over your weapons freely. If we find any, we’ll shoot you on the spot.’ ‘You’re likely to do that, even if you don’t find any,’ Plekhanov responded calmly. ‘But I don’t have any.’ The search did not end in immediate tragedy, but Plekhanov had to go into hiding, first in a clinic in Petrograd, then in Finland, at Pitkejarvi, near Terioki, where he died on 30 May 1918.
Lenin’s relations with Plekhanov went through a full cycle, from deep regard – ‘for twenty years, from 1883 to 1903, he gave the masses superb writings’ – to complete ostracism – ‘brand the chauvinist Plekhanov’. In fact, Marxism in Russia was raised on Plekhanov’s articles. No one, including Lenin, had noticed that Plekhanov, for all his orthodoxy, did not include in his vision of Marxism the distorted features which pepper Lenin’s writings. Plekhanov did not point out the ‘counter-revolutionary essence’ of the liberals, he did not reject parliamentarism, he accepted with reservations the idea of ‘proletarian hegemony’, and he accorded an enormous rôle to the intelligentsia in social movements. All this was later condemned as opportunism, liberal bootlicking, chauvinism, and so on. His particular sin was not merely ‘to accommodate himself to Menshevism and liberalism’, but to interpret the essence of class war in an ‘opportunistic fashion’.
Indeed, in the introduction to his unfinished work ‘The History of Russian Social Thought’, Plekhanov had written: ‘The development of any given society, divided into classes, is determined by the development of those classes and their mutual relations, that is, first, their mutual struggle where the internal social structure is concerned, and secondly, their more or less friendly collaboration when the defence of the country from outside attack is concerned.’85 He suggested that class relations of this type were especially characteristic of Russia, and that this had left an indelible imprint on Russian history. This view may have prompted his ‘defencist outlook’, but despite being labelled a ‘defencist’ and ‘social patriot’ by the Bolsheviks, he retained his views on the war until the end of his life. To Lenin’s call for Russian soldiers to fraternize with Germans, because Russia was conducting a predatory war, he responded ironically: ‘forgive us, good Teutons, for the fact that our predatory intentions made you declare war on us; made you occupy a large slice of our territory; made you treat our prisoners with arrogant bestiality; made you seize Belgium and turn that once flourishing country into a bloodbath; made you ruin many French provinces, and so on and so forth. It’s all our fault! Our terrible fault!’86
When he returned to Russia after more than thirty years of exile abroad, Plekhanov soon realized that being a Marxist theorist was not the same thing as being a revolutionary politician. He came out strongly against the idea of socialist revolution, accusing Lenin of forcing events for which Russia was not prepared,87 and was firmly convinced that Russia was not ready for ‘anything but a bourgeois revolution’.88 He was not understood. Was this the chief paradox of Plekhanov? All his life he had written about the class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leading rôle of the working class in restructuring society, and socialist revolution, as the goals of Marxist teaching. Yet when his own country raised its foot to cross the threshold of that revolution he staked all his authority on open protest. Perhaps this was not the real paradox. Plekhanov was too orthodox to depart from classical Marxist blueprints and to assent to leapfrogging stages. He regarded such an approach as ‘Leninist delirium’.
Plekhanov in a sense reflected the drama of the Russian nobility and intelligentsia. Realizing that only gradual change would put Russia on the path of genuine progress, one part of this social élite believed that such changes could be achieved by revolutionary methods, while another believed in the path of accommodation, adaptation and appropriate reordering of the existing system. It is therefore not surprising that Plekhanov, a noble from Tambov province, whose mother was related to Belinsky, the famous radical philosopher of the 1840s, should have a brother, Grigory, who was a police superintendent. When the then Bolshevik Nikolai Valentinov asked Grigory if the statues of Catherine the Great would be pulled down when the revolution came, the police superintendent replied, ‘What rubbish! When the revolution comes? There isn’t going to be one. There can’t be one in Russia. We’re not in France.’89 Georgy saw things differently, although for him the revolution, which was inevitable, must be the bourgeois one, which would last a long time. On the eve of the October revolution in 1917 he had the political courage to proclaim loudly that the coming regime must not be based