ABSTRACT
Born in Tambov Province, Plekhanov was to become ‘the father of Russian Marxism’. He became politically active in 1876 when the movement of the intelligentsia ‘to the people’ was under way. As a leader of the populist organization Land and Liberty Plekhanov opposed the increasing use of terror; arrested twice, he fled abroad in 1880. In his populist phase Plekhanov argued that history is not unilinear, that capitalism is the necessary predecessor of socialism only in the West, and that in Russia the existing form of communal land ownership by the peasants might serve as the starting point for a transition to socialism.
