The year 1956 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Georgy Plekhanov, the Russian Marxist theorist whose works Lenin called the most important "textbook of communism." In honor of the anniversary, the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg was named after the revolutionary. At first glance, this seems an ordinary occurrence, but the paradoxical situation was that Plekhanov was a Menshevik and almost openly accused the Bolshevik leader of treason against his homeland. Twenty years after 1917, such figures were, as Beria put it, "washed into camp dust. So why was Plekhanov's name immortalized in 1956, at that ideologically precise time, in the name of one of the most elite universities in the USSR?
Georgy Valentinovich was born in 1856 in the village of Gudalovka, Voronezh province. After graduating from a military gymnasium, he moved to the capital of the empire and enrolled in the Konstantinovsky Artillery School, but soon decided to change his junker uniform for the uniform of a student of the Mining Institute. Like many of his peers, the young man believed that the greatest benefit to his homeland will be able to engage in the exact and natural sciences. In 1874, he successfully passed the entrance examinations.
Plekhanov was a fairly ordinary low-income provincial student. It may seem strange, but his enthusiasm for the revolution came to him not from unwillingness to study, but rather, on the contrary, from the zeal he showed for his studies. A surprising thing happened - Gorny itself unwittingly helped to shape the personality of the rebellious populist Plekhanov.
In 1875 he was among the ten best students of the institute, for which he received the Catherine scholarship of 300 rubles. In the 70s of the XIX century for this money could buy a small village house or 60 poods of red caviar. In terms of modern money it is about 20 thousand dollars. Together with his friend Uspensky, Plekhanov rented an apartment in 67 Kronversky Prospect, where Uspensky's acquaintances, Mikhailov, Perovskaya, Khalturin, and Moiseenko, who often spent their nights dreaming of a new world order. Within a few months, the Narodniks began to hold illegal meetings in George's room as well. As a result, he joined the people's organization "Land and Will", became one of its leaders, and began to write theoretical and journalistic articles.
On the morning of December 6, 1876, a prayer was ordered in the Kazan Cathedral for the health of God's servant Nicholas. As the police would later find out, it was about Chernyshevsky. The strange-looking worshipers gathered in the square behaved calmly, but soon a young man wearing a Mining Institute cap ascended the right wing of the colonnade:
"Friends, we have come here to express our solidarity with the proletariat. On our banner is written "Land and Will to the Peasant and Worker!"" The police tried to stop the rally, but were rebuffed by the demonstrators and had to retreat. Twenty minutes later, reinforcements arrived - a crowd of patriotically-minded janitors swarmed into the meeting.
After becoming an outlaw, Georgy was expelled from the institute "for lack of success," as the document stated. Subsequently, Plekhanov's entire life was subordinated to the principle: "There is delight in battle and thirst for the abyss at the edge." His comrade in arms, Vera Zasulich, called this "the beauty of danger." Sometimes, "George" made a scandal at the police station because of a fake passport, then went to the Don and, calling for a Cossack uprising, almost fell under the a checkers of angry herders, then illegally crossed the border in company with smugglers.
At the same time, when "People and Will" disintegrated, its terrorist wing formed the "Narodnaya Volya" organization. Plekhanov, on the other hand, organized and led the secret society "Black Redistribution," faithful to purely Narodnik tendencies.
"A revolutionary idea in its inner content is some kind of dynamite, which will not be replaced by any explosive substance in the world," Georgy Valentinovich wrote. The comparison is not accidental! Back at the Mining Institute, Georges' favorite subject, as his classmates called it, was chemistry. He carried his adolescent love for this science throughout his life, but the idea itself is not accidental. Although he started out as a radical anarchist, he never threw bombs at its officials while destroying the foundations of the empire. We can find the answer to the question "why" in Plekhanov's diaries.
They describe an incident in his first year at university when, as a result of an unfortunate chemical experience, Georgy almost lost his fingers. Subsequently, he was an ardent opponent of terror as a means of political struggle, and it is possible that the reason for this was Georgy's acute aversion, even fear, to the element of explosion.
In 1880, Plekhanov emigrated to Switzerland, where he founded the first Russian Marxist organization, Liberation of Labor. At the turn of the century, he was one of the organizers of the founding congress of the RSDLP in London, which ended with the party splitting into two factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. It was at that moment that Plekhanov, who had briefly been a Bolshevik, diverged in his political convictions from Lenin and became the leader of the more moderate wing of the RSDLP.
In his numerous publications in foreign publications in 1905-1907, Plekhanov endlessly called for an armed uprising in Russia, while remaining in exile. However, in 1917 he could not withstand the heat and "put his head in the lion's mouth" - being an elderly and seriously ill man, he returned to Russia. Recall that we are talking about a revolutionary who was not shy in expressing himself to the Bolsheviks.
For example, "Lenin's April Theses are an insane and extremely harmful attempt to sow anarchic turmoil in the Russian land." Of the same Bolsheviks he wrote: "The triumph of Leninist tactics will bring with it such a disastrous, terrible economic destruction that a very significant majority of the country's population will turn their backs on the revolutionaries." Why did the Soviet government decide to name one of its ideological institutions after Georgy Valentinovich?
Here it makes sense to recall the context. In 1956, just as it was the 100th anniversary of George Plekhanov's birth, the 20th Congress of the CPSU took place. Historians often refer to it as the moment that ended the Stalinist era. The Congress was the first to talk about condemning the cult of personality, loosening ideological censorship in the arts, and the return of many formerly forbidden names. Probably on the wave of that democracy, Plekhanov's personality resurfaced.
In addition, national liberation movements were unfolding in the world, and the USSR also had to find in its history the names of heroes in tune with the revolutionary names of their leaders. A close example is Che Guevara, who, while already a mature man and holding a respectable position in Cuba, nevertheless left again to carry out his youthful ideas and set out on the path of danger and hardship.
Soon after the October coup, Plekhanov's tuberculosis began to worsen, followed by a hospital and sanatorium in a place called Yalkala. Despite his illness, he continued to follow Russian events avidly and in March 1918 learned of the Brest Peace Treaty he had signed. For George Valentinovich it was a huge personal disaster. His condition soon became hopeless, he quickly faded away and died in the arms of his wife on May 30.
In times of struggle against the Soviet legacy, the names of many revolutionary heroes were erased from the city's names. For example, Peter Lavrov Street became Furshtatskaya, Zhelyabov Street became Bolshaya Konyushennaya, and Stepan Khalturin Street became Millionnaya. The revolutionary surnames Zhdanov and Kalinin were permanently removed from the facades of LSU and Polytechnic. Once again Plekhanov Street became Kazanskaya Street, while for more than 50 years the St. Petersburg State Mining Institute was named after Georgy Plekhanov, a personality of international standing, who was and remains in the memory of the people.
