Emancipation of Labour
Emancipation of Labour was the first Russian Marxist group. It was founded in exile by Georgi Plekhanov, Vasily Ignatov, Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutsch, and Pavel Axelrod, at Geneva in 1883. Deutsch left the group in 1884 when he was arrested and sent to Siberia and Sergei Ingerman joined in 1888. The group published the first Russian language translations of many works by Karl Marx and distributed them. It became the major adversary to the Narodniks on the left wing of politics in the Russian Empire.
Two drafts of a program for the Russian Social Democrats, written by Plekhanov, were also published by the group, marking an important step to what would become the building of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. At the first congress of the Second International in Paris onwards, the group represented the RSDLP.
Within Russia itself, Emancipation of Labour influenced a separate group, the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, formed by Vladimir Lenin and others at Saint Petersburg in 1895. Lenin later wrote that Emancipation of Labour "laid the theoretical foundations for the Social-Democratic movement and took the first step towards the working-class movement in Russia."
Emancipation of Labour announced its dissolution during the second congress of the RSDLP, in August 1903.
