ABSTRACT
In 1914, on the eve of World War I, Georgi Plekhanov was known as the “Pope” of Russian Marxism. His authority and reputation as a theoretician was unrivalled. He had translated the Communist Manifesto into Russian, authored a seminal work on the role of the individual in history, and conducted a fierce and successful attack against of the theories of Narodnik populism in Russia and Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism abroad. Plekhanov was at the center of the development of Marxism as a political movement in Russia from its inception. He was one of the founders of Emancipation of Labor, the first Marxist organization in Russia, and subsequently a towering figure of the Russian Social-Democratic Party who participated in all of its developmental stages from a position of leadership.
