Georgi Plekhanov

Plekhanov started as a populist before founding the Emancipation of Labour group in 1883, Russia's first Marxist political organization. His theoretical writings converted revolutionaries including Lenin to the cause, earning him the title "father of Russian Marxism". In 1900 he partnered with Lenin to launch the party paper Iskra, and at the 1903 congress briefly sided with the Bolsheviks before breaking over what he saw as excessive centralism, becoming a Menshevik leader instead. During the 1905 revolution he argued Russia was only ready for bourgeois democracy, not proletarian power. World War I found him taking a nationalist "defensist" line supporting the Allies, isolating him from most international socialists. After the February Revolution he backed the Provisional Government and became a fierce opponent of the Bolsheviks, denouncing Lenin and calling the October seizure a disaster. He died of tuberculosis in Finland in May 1918, posthumously enshrined by the Soviet state as a founding father even as his warnings hung in the air.