Plekhanov: Russian Comparativist

Georgii Plekhanov and the Communist Manifesto: the Proletarian Revolution Revisited

“…Samuel Baron writes that Plekhanov's was 'the first attempt to devise a Marxian socialist program for an underdeveloped country,' and that Plekhanov perfectly realised that Marxism, which 'first arose in a social context very different from contemporary Russia,' had to be adjusted. 12 This interpretation is misleading. When Marx and Engels were proposing their communist strategies for Germany, it was not a highly industrialised, capitalist nation.…”

“…Baron and Ascher fail to note that this policy was incompatible with the German proposals of the Communist Manifesto to which Plekhanov himself referred. 25 On the contrary, Reidar Larsson and S. V. Tiutiukin suggest that Plekhanov closely followed The Manifesto's German policies in predicting a Russian proletarian revolution very soon after the fall of the tsar. But they leave it unexplained how Plekhanov could have reconciled this notion of an early proletarian revolution with his other thesis of the dependence of the proletarian revolution on the creation of a developed capitalist society.…”

Lenin on Holiday

“…After 1908 he escaped Geneva's damp winters by staying in her sanatorium at San Remo on the Italian Riviera. 11 The only vacations Barbara Clements mentions Aleksandra Kollontai taking were when she went to Bad Kohlgrub in Bavaria for a week on the eve of the First World War and then again during the summer of 1916 when she forsook revolutionary activity to stay with her son in New Jersey. 12 Leon Trotsky took a holiday with his wife in Saxony after the Fifth Party Congress in 1907.…”