From Dun Ming
Reprinted from "Flowers on the Other Side of the Ocean"
Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, chairman of the General Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, was a populist in his early years, one of the founders and leaders of the Russian Marxist political party for 20 years after 1883, the thinker who was the first to spread Marxism in Russia and Europe, and a well-known activist of the Russian and international workers' movement. He was greatly respected by Lenin, but after the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, he gradually parted ways with the Bolsheviks and turned to Menshevism, supporting nationalism during world war I and opposing the October Revolution thereafter.
One day in November 1999, the news shook all of Russia when Plekhanov's political will was found in a safe deposit box at bnseclin.
The will was written in May 1918, less than half a year after the October Revolution in Russia, and its author, Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, was the father of Russian Marxism and Lenin's mentor. Together with Marx and Engels, he wrote the preface and published the Communist Manifesto.
Plekhanov and his student Marx
However, to the surprise of those at that time, when Plekhanov finished writing his will, he put it in the safe deposit box of the Bank of Paris and forbade anyone to see it, and left a last word: My will should not be issued when the Russian Bolsheviks were in power, and could only be published when the Russian and Russian countries were gone. Soon after this, Plekhanov passed away.
On December 25, 1991, when the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviet Union vanished, people forgot Plekhanov's last words in 1918. It wasn't until 1999, when BNP Paribas was cleaning up the archives of Jewish property looted by the Nazis in World War II, that it accidentally discovered Plekhanov's will, which had been hidden in a safe deposit box for 81 years.
BNP Paribas handed the letter to Russia as agreed on the envelope, because it asked the Russian side to open it.
When the Russian personnel opened the yellowed envelope and took out the paper to read Plekhanov's will, everyone present was frighteningly pale, and they could hardly believe their eyes and everything written on this "terrible" will. So the Russians urgently mobilized all possible means to verify the authenticity of the will—they tested the paper and ink, and then scanned the handwriting in Plekhanov's notes in the file with a computer. But there was nothing wrong with everything, the will was indeed written by Plekhanov, and it was indeed written in 1918.
The core content of Plekhanov's last words:
First, with the development of the productive forces, the ranks of intellectuals increase faster than the proletariat, their role in the productive forces leaps to the forefront, and the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the electrical age will become obsolete.
Second, the dictatorship of the proletariat of the Bolsheviks will rapidly evolve into a one-party dictatorship and then into a dictatorship of leaders. Societies based on deception and violence, on the other hand, contain self-destructive explosives that will fall apart as soon as the truth is revealed.
The "Boo" party will encounter four major crises in turn: famine crisis, ideological crisis, socio-economic crisis and collapse crisis, and finally the collapse of the regime, a process that may last for decades, but no one can change this outcome.
The greatness of the state does not lie in its territory or even its history, but in its democratic traditions and in the standard of living of its citizens. As long as citizens are still poor, as long as there is no democracy, it is difficult for the country to prevent unrest until it collapses.
It is hard to believe that this was written 100 years ago, and when the October Revolution of 1917 was successful, Lenin's mentor Plekhanov left a last word at the last moment of his life that shocked everyone today!
The full text of Plekhanov's "will" is more than 30,000 words, and the content is very rich and colorful. Most shockingly, more than half a century later, many of the arguments in the "testament" have been mostly fulfilled, which does not seem to be summed up or explained by the word "coincidence". As a result, we have to look up to Plekhanov, and even admire him to the ground. In particular, we sincerely admire his superb ability to control politics and his profound vision of penetrating history. Plekhanov's talent, knowledge, and wisdom were no match for the so-called political or cultural giants of the Soviet Union at the time.