Georgi Plekhanov, the 'father of Russian Marxism'

• In Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883) and Our Differences (1885) Plekhanov argued that Russian revolutionaries had to accept the inevitability of Marx's 'stages of development'. He stressed that Russia had to pass through the capitalist phase of development and that this was clearly underway.
• Revolutionaries he believed should concentrate their activities among the Russian workers in the cities rather than wasting their energy on the peasantry for it was the Russian proletariat that the dynamism to drive a socialist revolution would emerge.
• Since the proletariat of Russia was still small and backward he wanted revolutionary leaders to organise the workers so as to be ready for Marxism but he warned their first task was to cooperate with the bourgeoisie to fight the autocracy in order to accelerate the capitalist stage.
• In 1886 students in St Petersburg tried to reform the 'Peoples Will' and in March 1887 a group who made bombs with the intention of assassinating Alexander III were arrested. Two months later 5 of these including Aleksandr Ulyanov Lenin's elder brother was hanged.