This is one of the better books Progress Publishers ever exported, and it is worth saying so at the outset. The five-volume Selected Philosophical Works was prepared not by a propaganda department but by the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, working with Plekhanov House — the archive attached to the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library in Leningrad that holds his manuscripts. The Publishers' Note records that the texts "have again been checked with the extant manuscripts in Russian or other languages" and with editions published in Plekhanov's lifetime. The annotations are substantial and largely factual: they date pamphlets, identify obscure Narodnik (Populist) journals, trace where a passage first appeared. The notes open with a statement of method — square brackets in the text "contain phrases and passages omitted in certain previous editions" — which is to say the editors restored material that earlier Russian printings had dropped, and told the reader they had done it. That is scholarship. The English is serviceable and in places better: The Development of the Monist View of History is given in Andrew Rothstein's translation, first published in London by Lawrence & Wishart in 1947, and most of the rest is R. Dixon's. For several of these texts these remain the only English versions in general circulation. A reader who wants Plekhanov in English still, more than half a century later, largely has to come here.
This is Volume I; the companions carry dates of 1976, 1976, 1980 and 1981, and the Publishers' Note sets out the division — the first three volumes on the defence of Marxism against Narodism, revisionism and Machism, the fourth on Russian philosophy and social thought, the fifth on literature and art. Volume I covers twelve years, 1883 to 1895, and it is the right twelve years. It opens with Socialism and the Political Struggle, the founding pamphlet of the Emancipation of Labour group, and Our Differences, the long settling of accounts with Narodism. It prints both the 1884 and 1887 draft programmes, the demolition of the renegade Lev Tikhomirov, the two versions of the 1889 Paris congress speech, the 1891 essay for the sixtieth anniversary of Hegel's death, Plekhanov's notes to his own Russian translation of Engels's Ludwig Feuerbach, and finally the Monist View with its two appendices against Mikhailovsky. This is Marxism arriving in Russia, written by the man who brought it. Whatever one concludes about Plekhanov after 1903, the case for reading these particular texts does not depend on the verdict.
The volume exists in this form because Lenin insisted on it. The introductory essay by V. Fomina ends on exactly that note: Lenin "pointed to the necessity of studying Plekhanov's philosophical works and insisted on their being republished". Plekhanov was thus the one leading Menshevik whose books never left Soviet print — an awkward exception that had to be managed, and the management is what repays attention here. The copyright page gives the sequence plainly: "First printing 1960 / Second revised edition 1974 / Third edition 1977", over a translation copyright of 1974. The book in your hands is therefore a 1974 text in a 1977 jacket, and the essay in front of it was written for 1960.
There is one thing this introduction can say that no other volume in this series can, and it took the rest of the catalogue to see it. While Progress was printing Plekhanov in five volumes, the same publisher was issuing philosophy textbooks that did not mention him. In V. G. Afanasyev's Marxist Philosophy (1980) — 130,932 words, the standard export primer — the name Plekhanov does not occur once. It is not a scanning artefact: the string does not appear in any mangled form, and the fragment "khanov" returns nothing at all. What the book does contain is a roll-call of the precursors of historical materialism in which "A big contribution to the theory of social development was made by Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky and other Russian revolutionary democrats of the 19th century." The men Plekhanov wrote his books about are credited; the man who wrote the books is not there. V. Krapivin's What is Dialectical Materialism? (first printing 1985, reprinted 1987) does the same, in 64,000 words, including a section on the philosophy of the Russian revolutionary democrats — and the title phrase is one this very volume shows Plekhanov defining in a footnote of 1895: "We use the term 'dialectical materialism' because it alone can give an accurate description of the philosophy of Marx." G. P. Frantsov's Philosophy and Sociology (1975) is the sharpest case: Plekhanov zero, Herzen fifty-eight times, Chernyshevsky forty-nine.
This is a choice and not an accident, and the proof is that another Progress textbook made the opposite one. A. F. Sheptulin's Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (1978) quotes Plekhanov approvingly four times and cites him by page from this very edition — his footnotes read Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1974, and Vol. II, Moscow, 1976 — on the origins of the materialist conception of history and on the role of the individual. The books were on the shelf and in the catalogue. Some authors used them and some wrote around them. Keeping a man in print is not the same as teaching him, and in the 1970s and 1980s Progress was doing the first while several of its own textbooks declined to do the second.
Fomina's essay is built as a bell curve. Up to 1903 the superlatives are unstinting: Plekhanov is "one of the world's greatest thinkers and publicists", the one Marxist of his generation who, in Fomina's account, "raised the banner of the fight against Bernsteinianism". After 1903 the register changes and the vocabulary becomes clinical — desertion, deviation, error, falling off. What is striking is that every cause assigned to the decline is external to Plekhanov's own thinking. His move to Menshevism was "determined in no small degree by the influence of reformism, which was widespread in the working-class movement in Western Europe". By 1917 he was "out of touch with the Russian revolutionary movement" and "a captive to the social-reformist and social-chauvinist theories of the Second International". He is acted upon; he does not decide.
The First World War, in which Plekhanov supported the Entente and broke publicly with Lenin, receives one sentence: "During the First World War Plekhanov adopted a social-chauvinist standpoint." No writing of his from 1914 to 1918 is named, quoted, dated or answered. October is handled in a subordinate clause — he "had a negative attitude towards the Great October Socialist Revolution, seeing it as a 'violation of all the laws of history'" — immediately followed by the mitigating clause that does the real work: "he did not fight against the victorious working class and Soviet power". Then he dies, and is buried near Belinsky and Dobrolyubov.
The device is not crude falsification. Nothing here is false in the narrow sense. It is a technique of containment: the political Plekhanov is reduced to a set of labels with no arguments attached, so that the philosophical Plekhanov can be preserved intact. The essay states the causal arrow explicitly — his "serious theoretical mistakes in philosophy" were "connected with ... his falling off to Menshevism in politics" — and the arrow runs one way only. Marxist philosophy is never at risk; the man went wrong, and where the philosophy went wrong it was politics that spoiled it. This is comfortable, and it is why a reader of this essay is given nothing whatever with which to judge the 1917 dispute for themselves. The silence is not accidental, and it is compounded by the shape of the edition. A. Maslin's introduction to Volume III is titled for Plekhanov's writings of 1901–13. Volume IV closes with Chernyshevsky in Siberia, dated 1913 in the contents; Volume V closes with Art and Social Life, dated 1912–13. Across five volumes and roughly 1.6 million words, not one text is dated later than 1913. The wartime and revolutionary Plekhanov is not merely under-argued, he is absent from the set — and the set announces its own completeness with an index of the writings it contains.
There is a second thing the essay is doing that is easy to miss. Plekhanov's polemic against the Narodniks' worship of "critically thinking individuals" — a genuine and central argument of the 1880s — is repeatedly rendered in Fomina's prose as a critique of "the cult of the individual", the exact formula of the Soviet campaign against Stalin's memory. She calls the Narodnik position "the extremely harmful cult of the individual, of the 'hero', who stands above the masses", and closes the passage with a sentence that is not about the 1890s at all: "Plekhanov's Marxist works still help in the fight to eliminate the remaining survivals of the cult of the individual." That was written for 1960. It survived the revision of 1974 and stands in the third edition of 1977, long after the campaign it belonged to had been quietly shut down — a small fossil of de-Stalinisation left embedded in a Brezhnev-era reprint. Whose cult is never said.
Against this, the apparatus deserves real credit for what it refuses to delete. Plekhanov's own notes to the 1905 edition attack Lenin by his pseudonym, accusing "Mr. Vladimir Ilyin" of professing the market theory of the vulgar economist J. B. Say. The editors print the attack and answer it in a note — "Plekhanov's statements about Lenin referring to the year 1905 are absolutely untrue" — rather than cutting it. A second note records that Plekhanov "ascribed Blanquism to Lenin in 1905". The 1892 "hieroglyph" passage on sensation, which Lenin had demolished in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, is printed in full and flagged. The same method runs through the Monist View: where Plekhanov argues that dialectical materialism cannot supply a mechanical explanation of history, the editors let the sentence stand and append a signed dissent beneath it — "Plekhanov's statement is radically at variance with the basic principles of Marxist-Leninist dialectics" — then quote Engels against him and give the page. Two further editorial notes take issue with his handling of the geographical environment, citing his own pages back at him. A reader can see the disagreement, locate both sides, and decide. Argument, not excision. Set beside what the same publisher did to the historical record elsewhere, this is a different order of editorial conduct, and the difference should be recorded.
The largest irony is one the framing cannot absorb at all. In Socialism and the Political Struggle, printed here complete, Plekhanov works through what would follow if a revolutionary minority seized power in an unripe Russia and refused to hand it back. Such a government, he writes, would "have to seek salvation in the ideals of patriarchal and authoritarian communism", modified only so that production was managed "not by the Peruvian 'sons of the sun' and their officials but by a socialist caste". Under such guardianship the people, "far from being educated for socialism, would even lose all capacity for further progress". Fomina's essay, which quotes generously from this pamphlet, does not quote that. No note attaches to it. In 1977, a Moscow institute of philosophy printed, without comment, an 1883 prediction of rule by a socialist caste. The book is more honest than its introduction.
What the essay withholds, Plekhanov's ablest opponent supplied, and supplied it early. Trotsky wrote a note on Plekhanov on 24 April 1922, four years after his death, as part of the introduction to the first two volumes of his own collected works; it was translated into English and printed in the American Fourth International, vol. 4 no. 3 (whole no. 31), March 1943 — the composition date is the one that matters here, not the issue. It is not a demolition. "This was a truly great man," Trotsky writes, having already written the same sentence once without the adverb, and the estimate that follows is close to Fomina's: Plekhanov did not create historical materialism, but "he introduced it into Russian life", overcoming "the homegrown revolutionary prejudices of the Russian intelligentsia, in which an arrogance of backwardness found its expression". The difference is everything that comes after. Where Fomina assigns the decline to Western reformism acting on Plekhanov from outside, Trotsky locates it inside the man's own situation: he was "a forerunner, the first crusader of Marxism on Russian soil", a theoretician without a party and without practice, and "this disturbance of the balance between theory and practice, which arose from the whole circumstances of Plekhanov's life, proved fatal for him". Where Fomina names no wartime writing, Trotsky names one, quotes it, and gives the page — the introduction to the History of Russian Social Thought (Moscow, 1919), in which Plekhanov limits the class struggle to domestic relations and replaces it, between nations, with "more or less friendly collaboration where the question of the defense of the country from external attack arises". Where Fomina reports a social-chauvinist standpoint, Trotsky quotes the moral premise Plekhanov reached for once the class criterion had gone: "defensive war is a just war". And he ends by claiming him: "The great Plekhanov, the true one, belongs entirely and wholly to us."
Plekhanov's error was symmetrical and equally consequential: from the correct premise that Russia's revolution would be bourgeois in its tasks he drew the fatal conclusion that its outcome must be a long capitalist development. That is the deduction Trotsky broke with in 1905–06, and the break was methodological before it was political. Michael Löwy sets it out in the dossier "Trotsky 60 years on" (International Viewpoint 324, September–October 2000), arguing that Trotsky's rejection of "economism, one of the essential traits of Plekhanov's Marxism" was a founding methodological premise of the theory of permanent revolution. Ernest Mandel put the genealogy more bluntly, answering Doug Jenness in "In Defense of the Permanent Revolution" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 21 no. 15, 8 August 1983): the expectation of a long capitalist development after the democratic revolution was "the old thesis of the whole Russian Social-Democracy first formulated by Plekhanov and reasserted in the Party program drafted jointly by Lenin and Plekhanov, which only Trotsky had challenged in 1905-1906". That sentence is worth setting against Fomina's, because it credits Plekhanov with more influence than she does — it makes his premise the common property of Russian Marxism, Lenin included, rather than a Menshevik deviation. The same exchange works over Marx, Engels and the Russian commune, and what Plekhanov's current was right and wrong about in the 1880s. The American Trotskyist George Novack goes further still: his essay "Sociology and Historical Materialism" builds its whole account of what Marxist sociology is on Plekhanov's threefold division of Marxism into dialectical materialism, historical materialism and scientific socialism, crediting him by name for the scheme. Frantsov's Philosophy and Sociology, a Soviet book on the history of social thought, never mentions him. Read any of these alongside this volume and the argument comes back to life — which is more than either the man's admirers or his official custodians managed to do for him.
Read the book. It is the best of Plekhanov, competently edited and decently translated. Read the introductory essay too, but read it as a document of 1960 rather than as an account of its subject: it is a small, careful demonstration of how a state that had made most of its own founding generation unmentionable went about keeping in print the one opponent it could not do without.