In 1895 a book appeared legally in St Petersburg under the name N. Beltov, with a title clumsy enough to bore a censor into passing it. The clumsiness was deliberate. Progress Publishers' own foreword to this printing says so: because propaganda for materialism was prohibited in tsarist Russia, the author gave the book, "as he put it, an 'intentionally clumsy' title", and the word monist was chosen to stand against a "dualist" view of history rather than to advertise the materialism underneath. Beltov was Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, writing from exile, and the book he smuggled past the censorship is the one that taught Russian Marxism to argue.
Start with the date of the text, because the spine misleads in the ordinary way. The Russian original is 1895. This English volume's copyright page records four printings — 1956, 1972, 1974 and 1980 — so what you hold is a fourth impression of a translation first issued in 1956, in the year the Foreign Languages Publishing House was becoming Progress. Nothing in it was rewritten for 1980. The Publishers' Foreword could have been composed at any point in the preceding quarter-century, and reads as though it was.
It deserves to be read as an argument and not only as an artefact, so take the argument first.
Plekhanov was answering N. K. Mikhailovsky, an editor of Russkoye Bogatstvo and the ablest theorist of Liberal Narodism, along with the sociologist N. I. Kareyev. In 117,639 words Mikhailovsky is named 292 times and Kareyev 44. That is the shape of the thing: a sustained demolition of named opponents, quoted at length from their own pages.
The method is what makes it durable. Rather than assert historical materialism and defend it, Plekhanov reconstructs the road to it — French materialism of the eighteenth century, the French historians of the Restoration, the utopian socialists, German idealist philosophy — and shows each school breaking on a problem the next inherits. Chapter I sets the trap that the whole book springs: if human nature is fixed and opinions govern the world, then opinions must themselves be explained, and the explanation cannot be opinion. Chapter IV opens on the reversal with a flourish that is characteristic of him — "The materialists of the eighteenth century were firmly convinced that they had succeeded in dealing the deathblow to idealism" — and then spends forty pages showing that the corpse wrote the next century's philosophy. He is generous to his adversaries in a way the tradition that later canonised him mostly was not: Hegel is named 227 times, Saint-Simon 50, Guizot 26, and none of them is a straw man.
He also, in a footnote to Chapter V, does something with consequences. Explaining why he will not accept "economic materialism" as a label — Marx, he notes, never called himself an economic materialist — he writes that he uses the term "dialectical materialism" "because it alone can give an accurate description of the philosophy of Marx". That is the phrase entering the language. Hold on to it; it returns below.
And the book is not the mechanical determinism its later reputation suggests. Its Conclusion states the aim of the whole materialist enterprise as an ideal, and says the word: what Marx and Engels wanted was "the subordination of necessity to freedom, of blind economic forces to the power of human reason". A reader arriving expecting economic fatalism will find the opposite argument being made against the Narodniks (the Populists), who were the ones accusing Marxists of quietism. Plekhanov's Preface notes drily that this charge "is not likely to be reiterated by anyone nowadays".
The Preface also contains the best single sentence about what a polemic is. Asked why he corrected only slips and misprints between editions, he answered that altering the substance of a polemical work "is like appearing before your adversary with a new weapon, while compelling him to fight with his old weapon" — the more scrupulous, he adds, because Mikhailovsky was by then dead. Progress's own foreword calls the book polemical, lively and readable, and says that although small it "gives a sufficiently full account of the main features of Marxist philosophy". On that, the publisher and this introduction agree without reservation.
The Publishers' Foreword is a compact piece of editorial engineering, and worth reading closely because the same operation runs through the whole Soviet Plekhanov industry.
It gives him everything up to 1903 — the Emancipation of Labour Group, the fight against Narodism, the first attack on Bernstein's revisionism — and then executes a turn in a single sentence: "After 1903 Plekhanov went over to Menshevism—the opportunist trend in Russian Social-Democracy—and made a considerable number of mistakes in appraising contemporary developments". The sentence is immediately followed by a rescue, and the rescue is Lenin's, from 1921: you cannot become a real, intelligent Communist without studying all of Plekhanov's philosophical writings, "because nothing better has been written on Marxism anywhere in the world."
That is the formula the series has come to call credit-and-containment: the philosophy is canonical, the politics is quarantined, and Lenin supplies the warrant for both halves. It is worth saying plainly that this is not censorship of the text. The book is printed whole, its arguments unmutilated, its author named. The containment happens in the framing.
Progress executed the same operation at scale. Between 1976 and 1981 it issued Plekhanov's Selected Philosophical Works in five volumes — I (1977, itself a third edition following printings of 1960 and 1974), II (1976), III (1976), IV (1980), V (1981) — some 1.66 million words prepared by the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences. It is a serious scholarly edition. Volume I's Publishers' Note records that the texts were re-checked against manuscripts held in Plekhanov House and the Saltykov-Shchedrin library in Leningrad, and names the translators: the Monist View is Andrew Rothstein's, first published by Lawrence & Wishart in London in 1947, with Plekhanov's preface and "A Few Words to Our Opponents" translated by A. Fineberg.
Volume I also carries three signed Editor's Notes that argue with Plekhanov in the open rather than cutting him. One tells the reader flatly that a statement of his is "radically at variance with the basic principles of Marxist-Leninist dialectics", and rebuts it with Engels. Another warns that his treatment of geographical environment "cannot be regarded as absolutely correct". This is a real editorial virtue and the series should say so: an editor who prints the offending passage, marks it, and gives his reasons has left the reader able to disagree with him. Note the limit, though — I counted the notes across all five volumes, and all three are in Volume I. Volumes II to V carry none.
The introductory essays do the heavier work, and they are franker than the standalone foreword. Volume IV's essay speaks of "the political sin which Plekhanov committed after the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. (1903), when he went over to the Menshevik position", traces the damage into the 1909 Chernyshevsky book and the articles on Belinsky and Herzen, and states its exclusion criterion out loud: Plekhanov's legacy is to be assessed not through his late History of Russian Social Thought but through the work of the 1880s and 1890s. Whatever else that is, it is not concealment. It tells you what has been left out and why.
But here is what the whole edition will not do, and it is the finding of this introduction.
I was briefed that the five-volume set stops dead in 1913. It does not, and the correction matters. Volume V closes with a cumulative alphabetical index of every work across all five volumes, and that index dates three items later: "Utopian Socialism in the Nineteenth Century" (1914), the preface to Deborin's Introduction to the Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism (1916), and "From Idealism to Materialism" (1917). All three are printed, not merely listed, in Volume III. The edition's own notes date the Deborin preface to the end of 1915 and place "From Idealism to Materialism" as completed by Plekhanov at the beginning of 1915 and published in Moscow in 1917.
So Progress printed Plekhanov's philosophical writing from the very years of his defencism — from the war he supported and the revolution he opposed.
And across all 1,662,177 words of those five volumes, the words that name what he did in those years do not occur. Defencism: zero. Defencist: zero. Social-patriotism: zero. Social-chauvinism: zero. Zimmerwald: zero. Yedinstvo, the group and paper through which he conducted his 1917 politics: zero. This is not a search artefact — the underlying stems are everywhere in the ordinary senses (defence and patriot run to dozens of uses per volume in Plekhanov's own prose), so the nil is on the terms, not on my spelling of them.
The containment, then, is not chronological and not even topical. It is lexical and generic. Menshevism can be named, repeatedly, and called opportunism and a sin. The defencism of 1914–17 cannot be named at all, while the philosophy written during it is set in type. The apparatus argues with Plekhanov about geographical environment and about mechanism; about August 1914 it has no vocabulary.
There is a second, stranger fact, and I have been careful with it because an earlier version of the claim was too strong.
Some of Progress's own philosophy textbooks do not mention Plekhanov at all. V. G. Afanasyev's Marxist Philosophy (1980) uses his name zero times in 130,932 words, in a book that finds room for Belinsky, Herzen and Chernyshevsky. Krapivin's What Is Dialectical Materialism? (1985, reprinted 1987) has zero, including in a section on the revolutionary democrats. Philosophy and Sociology (1975) has zero, against 58 mentions of Herzen and 49 of Chernyshevsky.
The tempting conclusion is a systematic erasure. It is wrong. A. F. Sheptulin's Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (1978) quotes Plekhanov approvingly on the role of the great personality and footnotes him to the edition, by volume and page — Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1974, p. 497, and Vol. II, Moscow, 1976, p. 314. Oizerman's Main Trends in Philosophy has eleven mentions; Zis's Foundations of Marxist Aesthetics has ten.
That makes the corrected claim the stronger one. Sheptulin proves the volumes were on the shelf, in print, and citable by page, in the same years and from the same publisher. The silence in Afanasyev, Krapivin and Frantsov is therefore a choice made by particular authors, not a prohibition and not an availability problem. It is a divided practice — which is much harder to explain away than a blanket ban would have been, because it means someone decided each time.
One detail sharpens it to a point. Krapivin's book is called What Is Dialectical Materialism? The phrase is Plekhanov's, defended in the footnote to Chapter V quoted above, in the volume you are holding. Krapivin does not cite him once.
The anti-Stalinist left did not need to rescue Plekhanov from Moscow, because it never gave him up — and it did the thing the Soviet apparatus could not, which was to name the collapse and go on admiring the man.
The central text is Trotsky's, written on 24 April 1922 as part of the introduction to the first two volumes of his collected works, published that year in Under the Banner of Marxism, and printed in English by the American Socialist Workers Party in Fourth International, vol. 4 no. 3 (whole no. 31), March 1943. (The composition date is four years after Plekhanov's death and twenty-one years before the issue that carries it; the archive's issue date is the printing, not the writing, and the distinction matters here.) It opens by conceding the ruin — that a generation knew Plekhanov only in his "patriotic" decline — and then insists twice over: "This was a truly great man."
Trotsky's assessment of what Plekhanov did is more exact than the Progress foreword's, and more limited. He did not create historical materialism and added nothing new to it, Trotsky writes; what he did was introduce it into Russian life, which was "a merit of enormous significance". He locates both the achievement and the failure in the same fact — that Plekhanov was a forerunner, "the first crusader of Marxism on Russian soil", a theoretician without a party to apply the theory in, and that the imbalance between theory and practice proved fatal when 1905 and then 1914 arrived.
And where the five Progress volumes have no word for the defencism, Trotsky quotes it. He reproduces Plekhanov's late formula that a defensive war is a just war, cites the introduction to the History of Russian Social Thought in which class struggle governs a society's internal affairs while national solidarity governs its external ones, and observes that this is a doctrine from Sombart and not from Marx — Sombart being a man Plekhanov had spent decades demolishing. That is an act-attached charge: a named text, a quoted sentence, a specified reversal, all of it refutable by anyone who opens the book. It is precisely what the Soviet apparatus's unfalsifiable "political sin" is not.
The essay's last move is the one worth putting beside the Publishers' Foreword. Trotsky notes that Plekhanov's admirers in his decline had gathered his worst writings into a separate edition, and says that by doing so they only helped separate the false Plekhanov from the real one, who "belongs entirely and wholly to us."
Both traditions, in other words, front this author with a claim of inheritance, and both cite Lenin's 1921 sentence to do it — the Fourth International editors quoting it in 1943 in one translation, Progress quoting it in this volume in another. The difference is not whether Plekhanov is claimed. It is whether the claim requires an unnameable remainder.
That claim stayed live. Fourth International went on to print Plekhanov himself: his essay on Hegel in April 1949, and "Belinsky and Rational Reality" serialised across four issues from spring 1955 to spring 1956. Nearly thirty years later George Novack, in "In Defense of Engels" (Intercontinental Press, 16 February 1976), answered the fashionable claim that Plekhanov's philosophy was the seed of his politics, wrote that "Plekhanov, Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky are our teachers", and named, without flinching, "Plekhanov's bad conduct in 1905, 1914, and 1917" — the three dates the five Progress volumes cannot print. Novack's Understanding History builds its own account of Marxist sociology directly on Plekhanov's division of Marxism into dialectical materialism, historical materialism and scientific socialism, crediting him by name. That tripartition is also, as it happens, the architecture of Progress's own ABC of Social and Political Knowledge series, whose volumes 5, 6 and 7 are Scientific Communism, Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism — one of which is Krapivin's.
Readers comparing editions should know the following. This edition is set from the Progress Publishers printing whose imprint page reads "First printing 1956 / Second printing 1972 / Third printing 1974" — the printing immediately before the 1980 fourth printing this series catalogues, and the same setting of type: the same pagination, the same contents, the same 334 pages.
The text is complete: the Publishers' Foreword, the Preface to the Second and Third Editions, Chapters I to V, the Conclusion, both appendices, the notes and the indexes. An earlier digitisation used for this series broke off after Chapter IV, and an earlier state of this introduction accordingly took its quotations from Chapter V and the Conclusion from the composite text held by the Marxists Internet Archive, flagging them as external. That is no longer necessary and no longer true of this book. Every quotation above is taken from the printing and verified against it — including the footnote in Chapter V that defends the term "dialectical materialism" "because it alone can give an accurate description of the philosophy of Marx", and the Conclusion's statement of the ideal as "the subordination of necessity to freedom, of blind economic forces to the power of human reason".