When Karl Marx and his fellow sponsor Friedrich Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto, they probably didn't even imagine that this pamphlet with a creepy beginning about a wandering ghost would become a bestseller, and where - in Russia! Marx himself did not like this country for many reasons. Therefore, he could not even imagine that it would become a place for an attempt to implement his ideas.
As Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) popularly explained many years later, Marxism is a product of the synthesis of three main ingredients: English political economy, Thomas More's utopian ideas and classical philosophy. They are also the sources and components of this teaching.
When G. Plekhanov translated the Manifesto into Russian in 1882, this theory was not very popular in Europe. Marxism in Russia also did not immediately capture the minds, but disputes immediately began among its admirers. The intellectuals, disappointed in the people's will, were looking for a new application for their theoretical research.
Marxism is a theory based on a materialistic perception of the surrounding world. Georgy Plekhanov considered philosophy the most importantfrom the sciences, which, unlike other, secondary branches of human knowledge, covers the entire picture of the universe. History, in his opinion, studies the process of development of production relations and productive forces.
The "Black Redistribution" party, created by Plekhanov and Axelrod, signaled the rise of Russian Marxism. He saw the path to social transformation through the struggle between the representatives of the feudal classes, who had outlived their historical age, and the bourgeoisie. The victory of the latter opened the way for the working class.
More radical measures were going to act a new generation of Russian Marxists - the Social Democrats. They regarded both the bourgeoisie and all the classes standing between it and the proletariat as reactionary. Contradictions within the RSDLP led it to split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, at the second congress of this party. The initiator of the split was Leon Trotsky, who took a maximalist and irreconcilable position. In 1917 the Bolsheviks carried out a violent seizure of power. It was not immediately called a revolution. For example, I. V. Stalin often refers to this event as a coup, not only in his articles, but also in their titles.
Now nothing prevented us from conducting a very bold and historically unparalleled experiment on one sixth of the land mass of the entire planet. It consisted in instilling in the huge and multinational composition of the former Russian Empire many concepts that until then were completely alien to him.
Of course, not all ofthis theory was to be grafted. Marxism is a theory, but in practice… The renunciation of property, the institution of marriage and the right to raise one's children remained unrealized elements of a real communist society. Universal equality was also not achieved. People remained people, they wanted to have their own house and their own things.
However, even today there are people for whom Marxism is a method of overcoming the contradictions of modern society. The desire for equality and social justice makes them today open the Communist Manifesto and read again with nostalgia about the ghost roaming Europe…
