PLEHVE Y PLEKHANOV (1874)

VYACHESLAV KONSTANTINOVICH PLEHVE

Reactionary statesman whose efforts to uphold autocratic principle, bureaucratic government and class privilege resulted in the suppression of revolutionary nationality groups within the Russian Empire.

He was largely responsible for the policies that led to the Russo-Japanese War.

Appointed director of the police department in the Ministry of Interior after the assassination of Emperor Alexander II (1881) he became head of the Imperial Chancellery (1894) and acting minister and state secretary for the Grand Duchy of Finland (1899).

In 1902 he became minister of Interior.
From these positions he obstructed liberal local governmental (zemstva) activity, harshly pursued russification policies, particularly against the Armenians and the Finns and encouraged anti-Semitic propaganda that led to a violent pogrom at Kishinev now in the Moldavian (April 1903).
To assuage labour discontent he backed police-controlled patriotic labour unions.

When his programs failed to calm tensions within the empire he called for a victorius foreign war to arouse unity and patriotism and supported the Russian policy in Korea that provoked conflict with Japan.

Plehve was assassinated by a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.


GEORGY VALENTINOVICH PLEKHANOV

Marxist theorist the founder and for many years the leading exponent of the Marxist movement in Russia.

Having left his studies to become a revolutionary populist Plekhanov became a leader in the Land and Freedom organization (1877) but left Russia in 1880 to avoid arrest.

Settling in Geneva he abandoned populism for Marxism founded the Liberation of Labour, the first Russian Marxist revolutionary organization (1883) and developed the idea that Russia would undergo a two-phase (a bourgeois followed by a Socialist) revolution.

In 1898 he merged his group with other Russian Marxist circles to form the Russian Social Democratic Workers´ Party in which he was a leading figure and theoretician.

In 1903 the Russian Social Democrats split into two factions -Lenin´s Bolsheviks and the wing Plekhanov ultimately joined, the Mensheviks.

Plekhanov spent the rest of his political life trying to reunite the party.
After the Russian Revolution of 1905 his influence declined.
In 1917 he returned to Russia but he was unable to prevent the Bolsheviks from seizing power later that year.