Lenin and the Jacobin identity in Russia

By what process was the Jacobin identity transplanted into nineteenth-century Russian radical culture? According to the conventional account, the Jacobin label was coined by proponents like Zai?nevskij and Tka?ev. Lenin, in turn, is said to have derived his Jacobin identity from them, thus revealing the non-Marxian source of his political ideas. This article contests that interpretation through a study of the origin and spread of the Jacobin terminology in post-emancipation Russia. I show that the Jacobin identity in Russia was invented by anti-Jacobin populists and that there were scarcely any self-proclaimed Jacobins prior to Lenin. I also reconstruct the path by which Lenin came to identify with French Jacobinism. That path remained within the territory of Marxist theory from beginning to end.     

PLEKHANOV,LENIN AND WORKING-CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

Studies in East European Thought - According to the prevailing scholarly view, made popular by Neil Harding, Lenin is said to have derived his well-known theory of working-class consciousness in...     

Stalin as a Marxist Philosopher

This article treats Stalin's contributions todialectical and historical materialism. It argues that the latterfound his theses of the `enormous' role of ideas, and of theexistence of social phenomena that do not belong either to thebasis or to the superstructure, in Georgij Plekhanov's `monism'.Nevertheless, Stalin did add some new points of his own.Furthermore, his adopting Plekhanov's monism also helps usunderstand the apparent contradiction between Stalin's emphasison non-economic and non-class factors in human history and hisrejection of `idealist' rudiments in dialectics.