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.