ABSTRACT
The old perspective of socialist transition in Russia was only upheld by the so-called Maximalist faction of the party, arguably the true heirs of nineteenth-century Russian socialism. The reformulation of Marxism began in Russia, where Georgii Plekhanov first formulated the thought that the proletarian revolution required a workers’ majority in the population. Plekhanov confirmed that the fall of absolutism and the triumph of socialism would necessarily be separated from each other by a ‘considerable stretch of time’. Plekhanov admitted that there could be a ‘shortening of the duration’ of the capitalist stage, and that Russian capitalism might reach maturity in less time than its British predecessor had. During the 1840s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had injected the idea that communism required the conditions of integral industrialisation into the communist movement. Remarkably, even the Socialists-Revolutionaries, or in any case their majority faction, abandoned the nineteenth-century populist tenet that Russia was ripe for the transition to socialism.
