MIA > Archive > Riazanov > Plekhanoc/ELG
1. Vasily Nikolaevich Ignatov. Born in the late 1850s. He
took part in the revolutionary movement of the 1870s whilst remaining
within the law. He died in 1885.
2. Lev Grigoryevich Deich. Born in 1855. The son of a
merchant. Educated at the seven-form Kyiv Gymnasium. Enlisted in the
army as a volunteer. Arrested in 1876, he escaped from military
custody. In 1877, together with Yakov Stefanovich and Ivan
Bokhanovsky, he led a campaign of agitation amongst the peasants of
Chigirin. Arrested a second time, he escaped from the Kyiv prison in
May 1878. He travelled illegally to Russia on several occasions. In
1883, he and his comrades founded the group ‘Liberation of
Labour’. In 1884, he was arrested in Freiburg, Germany, under
the name of Bulygin, whilst in possession of a consignment of
Social-Democratic publications. He was extradited to the Tsarist
government on the condition that he be tried solely as a criminal for
the attempted murder of Gorinovich. He stood trial at the Odessa
Military District Court in 1884 and was sentenced to 13 years and 4
months’ hard labour. He began his sentence in 1885. He was
released on parole in September 1890. He did not receive any
remissions under the 1891 manifesto. It was only under the manifesto
of 14 November 1894 that Deychu’s term of hard labour was
reduced by one-third. Following this further remission under the
manifesto, he left Kary for Sretensk in May 1897. In March 1901, he
was enrolled in the peasant community of the village of Vladimirovka,
Ivanovskaya volost, Amur Governorate, and in April 1901 he
fled from Blagoveshchensk via America to Western Europe (November
1901). He took part in the overseas organisation Iskra. After
17 October 1905, he returned to Russia and was arrested again in
January 1906. Sentenced in July 1906, he escaped in September 1906
whilst being transported from Yeniseysk to the Turukhansk region. In
1914, he joined the ranks of those who ‘welcomed the war’
and published a magazine in America in a social-patriotic vein. In
addition to a number of articles in which Deich depicts individual
episodes from the history of the revolutionary movement of the 1870s,
it is worth noting the books Sixteen Years in Siberia [1],
translated into all European languages, and Four Escapes.
3. Vera Ivanovna Zasulich, born in 1851. She was arrested
for the first time in connection with the Nechayev affair. Exiled
under administrative orders, she took an active part in the
revolutionary movement of the 1870s. On 24 January 1878, she wounded
the Governor of St Petersburg, Trepov, with a shot from a revolver;
it was on his orders that the political prisoner Bogolyubov had been
flogged. Brought to trial, she was acquitted on 31 March of that same
year. When, upon leaving the court, the gendarmes again attempted to
arrest her, she managed to escape with the help of her comrades.
Following the split in Land and Liberty (Zemlya i Volya), she
joined Black Repartition (Cherny Peredel). In 1880, she was
forced to leave Russia for good and from then on lived abroad, mainly
in Switzerland. In the early 1880s, together with P. Lavrov, she
played an active role in the organisation of the ‘Red Cross of
People’s Will’. Following the founding of the
‘Emancipation of Labour’ Group, she turned her attention
to literary work. Together with Plekhanov, she contributed to the
publications of legal Marxism under the pseudonyms Ivanova and
Karelina. She is the author of a well-known book on Rousseau. After
1905, a legal edition of her works was published in two volumes.
During Plekhanov’s struggle against the ‘liquidators’,
she aligned herself with Potresov’s group, but after 1914,
alongside the Menshevik ‘defenders of the war’, she once
again found herself in the same camp as her old friend.
4. Pavel Borisovich Axelrod. Born in 1850 in the Mglinsky
District of Chernigov Governorate. He studied at the Mogilev
Gymnasium and the Nezhin Institute. He took part in the revolutionary
movement in the early 1870s. He was most active in the south of
Russia, in Kyiv and Odessa. He was one of the members of the Kyiv
Commune, which was destroyed in the pogrom of 1874. In October 1874,
he was arrested in the village of Bogdanovka, Klimovichsky District,
Mogilev Governorate, but managed to escape. Having gone abroad, he
took part in the international labour movement, aligning himself with
the anarchists. He was one of the editors and most active
contributors to Obschina. Even at that time, he took a
particular interest in discussing tactical issues of the
revolutionary movement. Having gone abroad, Axelrod returned to
Russia illegally on several occasions. In the late 1870s, he played a
prominent role in the organisation of the South Russian Workers’
Union. In 1881, he took part in the International Congress held in
Chur, Switzerland. He contributed to the newspaper Volnoe Slovo
(Free Word), published by Dragomanov, in which he mainly
chronicled the Western European labour movement. Having become a
Social Democrat, he constantly shared his wealth of experience as a
seasoned agitator amongst the workers with the youth –
verbally, in letters to revolutionary groups active in Russia, and
later in print. In his articles of the 1890s, he particularly
emphasised the need for Russian Social Democracy to take the lead in
the struggle against tsarism. Unlike Plekhanov and Zasulich, he took
almost no part in the legal Russian press (apart from an article on
Henry George’s economic theory in Delo in September and
October 1883). Following the self-dissolution of the ‘Emancipation
of Labour’ group, he became the chief theorist of the Menshevik
centre. In 1914, unlike his former comrades in the group, he refused
to ‘accept’ the war, but consistently supported the
tactics of the Menshevik faction in the State Duma.
5. Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov. Born on 26 November 1856, at the Gudalovka estate, Tambov Governorate, Lipetsk District. After graduating from the military gymnasium in Voronezh, he initially enrolled at the Konstantinovsky Military School in Petrograd, but soon dropped out and transferred to the Mining Institute in 1874. He began his revolutionary activities amongst the ‘rebels’. On 6 December 1876, during the Kazan demonstration, he delivered a fiery speech in which he denounced the Russian government, which was stifling all life and tearing the finest elements from the ranks of the Russian people, only to throw them into dungeons or send them to distant Siberia. By a stroke of luck, he was not arrested, but soon had to go underground. After a brief stay abroad, he returned to Russia in July 1877 and took up a prominent position in the new organisation ‘Land and Freedom’ as one of its finest propagandists. He took part in drawing up the new party’s programme and, when ‘Land and Freedom’ began publishing its journal, he was elected as one of the editors. In 1878 and 1879, he played an active role in agitation amongst St Petersburg’s factory workers. The strikes at the New Paper Mill in March 1878, at König’s spinning mill beyond the Narva Barracks in November of the same year, at the New Paper Mill and at Schau’s factory in January 1879, and at the tobacco factories – in all these instances, Plekhanov helped the workers to formulate their demands and brought their needs to the attention of ‘public opinion’. At the same time, he became close friends with the worker Stepan Khalturin, the chief organiser of the North Russian Workers’ Union. At the Voronezh Congress, where representatives of the old Narodnik views clashed with the advocates of the new political platform, he defended the old programme with particular passion. Having split off with other comrades, he attempted with them to publish Black Repartition (Cherny Peredel) in Russia, but, following the failure of the printing press, he was forced to leave Russia for an extended period in early 1880. The rest of his life up to 1903 is inextricably linked with the history of the Osvobozhdenie Truda (Emancipation of Labour) group. From 1891, when his article On the Sixtieth Anniversary of Hegel’s Death appeared in the German journal Die neue Zeit, he took an active part in the work of Western European revolutionary thought, which set itself the aim of substantiating and further developing scientific socialism. He very quickly succeeded in establishing himself as one of the most outstanding theorists of international Social Democracy. We need only mention Anarchism and Socialism, Essays on the History of Materialism (Helvétius, Holbach and Marx), and his articles against Bernstein. Let us recall that G. Plekhanov, together with V.I. Zasulich, were, at the insistence of the Russian government, expelled from Switzerland in 1889. In 1895, the French Republic, in order to please the Tsarist government, expelled the ‘anarchist’ (?!) Plekhanov from its territory. When Marxism entered the arena of legal literature, Plekhanov took a most active part in the polemic against Mikhailovsky and the Narodniks. Writing under various pseudonyms (Beltov, Volgin, Utis, Ushakov, Kamensky), he, as in his books (On the Development of the Monistic View of History and The Justification of Narodism in the Works of V.V.), so in his numerous articles, he produced the most brilliant examples of literary polemics and popular exposition of the philosophical and socialist foundations of Marxism. From the time of the 1905 Revolution, Plekhanov devoted himself almost exclusively to legal literature and, apart from his polemics with the anarcho-syndicalists, concentrated on historical, literary and philosophical issues. Shortly before the war, he began publishing his extensive work on the history of Russian social thought, which remained unfinished. Between 1914 and 1917, Plekhanov appeared both in individual pamphlets and in his articles in Prizyv as a passionate advocate of the ‘just’ war. On his return to Russia, he took up the post of chairman of the commission on improving the living conditions of railway workers (the so-called ‘Plekhanov bonus’) and organised the ‘Unity’ group. At the Moscow State Conference in August 1917, he spoke, in Kerensky’s words, alongside Breshko-Breshkovskaya and Kropotkin on behalf of the ‘History’ group. He died in Finland on 30 May 1918.
1. Leo Deutsch, Sixteen Years in
Siberia, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1905.
https://archive.org/details/cu31924023036142.
Last updated on 11 October 2026