Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism

Description

This book attempts to cover a rather broad historical canvas. It is, in part, an interpretive essay on the evolution of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, an unique social formation in the intellectual history of Europe; it is more largely a study of the reception that Marxist ideology encountered, and of the transformations that it underwent, in the hands of this estranged group of Russia's nineteenth-century society. It is partly an analysis of the emergence of Bolshevism and Menshevism, the two opposing interpretations of Marxist doctrine - and Russian reality - around which most of the Russian Marxists ultimately coalesced; and partly an analysis ofthe early development of Plekhanov, Akselrod, Martov, and Lenin, the four figures who were chiefly responsible for the delineation of these conflicting interpretations. These areas of Russia's nineteenth-century intellectual history have been explored in an effort to consider the whole complex of factors that entered into the development of the conception of man and of social reality to which the founders of Bolshevism and Menshevism ultimately gave voice.