Pavel Axelrod
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Pavel Axelrod
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| Born | 1850 Shkloŭ, Ukraine |
| Died | 1928 Berlin, Germany |
Pavel Borisovich Axelrod (Russian: Павел Борисович Аксельрод 1850 – 1928) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary.
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[edit] Private life
Born Pinchas Borutsch (Russian: Пинхус Борух) in Shkloŭ and raised in Mogilev, a small provincial town in the Russian Empire (currently Belarus), Axelrod was the son of a poor Jewish innkeeper.
In 1875 in Geneva Axelrod married his former private student Nadezhda Ivanovna Kaminer. A student himself Axelrod was her and her sister tutor. Despite young family severe financial hardship during first years, marriage proved to be successful. They had three children : Faith (1876), Alexander (1879) and Sofia (1881). Axelrod-Kaminer died in 1905. In the mid-1880s Axelrod established his own small company producing kefir. By the end of the 1890s company had offices in Zurich, Geneva and Basel and provided steady income to Axelrod, his family and due to Axelrod generosity was source of material support to the other revolutionaries. In 1908 firm "Axelrod-kefir" has been sold in exchange for the retirement payments to it founder by the new owner. Pavel Axelrod died in exile in Berlin, in 1928.
[edit] Marxist revolutionary
Influenced by Mikhail Bakunin in his youth, he remained an Idealist even after adopting the Marxist philosophy of historical materialism. Axelrod co-founded the Marxist group Emancipation of Labor in Switzerland with his lifelong friend Georgi Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich in 1883. In 1900, Axelrod, Plekhanov and Zasulich joined forces with younger revolutionary Marxists Julius Martov, Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Potresov and the six edited Iskra, a Marxist newspaper, in 1900-1903. When Iskra supporters split at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903, Axelrod sided with the Menshevik faction against Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks.
In 1917, after the February Revolution Axelrod returned to Russia. By then some Mensheviks had already joined Kerensky's Provisional Government and supported government war policy. Despite all his efforts Axelrod failed to gain Mensheviks' support for a policy of immediate peace negotiations with the Central Powers. After the Bolshevik victory, which Axelrod called a "historical crime without parallel in modern history", he toured the world rallying socialist opposition to the Bolsheviks.
[edit] References
- Abraham Ascher. Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism, Harvard University Press, 1972, ISBN 0-674-65905-8, 420p.
