Word: plekhanov
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...part in a student protest. While idling at home, he discovered the works of Karl Marx, which prophesied the inevitable collapse of capitalism and its empires. He did finally get a law degree, but his fascination with Marxism led him to Switzerland, to an encounter with the exiled Georgi Plekhanov, the eminence grise of Russian Marxism; then to meetings with other radicals in Paris and Berlin; then, on his return home, to arrest, trial, jail and exile in Siberia. So Lenin was far away when the Social Democratic Party was born in Minsk and then nearly destroyed. But when...
This split in revolutionary strategies lasted for decades, and though the Bolsheviks claimed a majority, they were often outvoted within the party. Plekhanov tended to side with the Mensheviks, and so did an obstreperously brilliant newcomer named Lev Bronstein, who signed his fiery pamphlets with the name Trotsky. Lenin fought ruthlessly for control. He denounced his opponents as not Social Democrats but "Social Chauvinists," as "puerile," as "windbags"; after he lost a vote, he would accuse the winners of spiritless "parliamentarianism." When the Russian workers rose up in the largely spontaneous revolt of 1905, it was Trotsky, still only...