Sergei Prokopovich

Under the influence of the German Revisionist Social-Democrat Eduard Bernstein, the British Fabians, French Possibilism and the emerging Russian trade union movement, Prokopovich and his wife, E.D.

Kuskova (1869–1958), moved away from 'orthodox' Marxism toward a position their critics (Georgi Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin and others) criticised as 'Economism'.

In fact, these critics used the term 'Economism' rather loosely and also applied it to revolutionary syndicalist currents within the Social-Democratic party.

The dispute can also be seen as part of the controversy over Revisionism and Possibilism which raged in European Marxist parties around the turn of the century.

From different points of departure, all had arrived at the conclusion that, in Russia's present state of history, the bourgeoisie should take the lead in the political struggle against tsarism.

It was here that he wrote the first part of his political novella Rodina i Mat ("Fatherland and Mother"), which was set in an idealized Russian past, in which peasants and workers held power.

However, he was dissatisfied by the Great Russian national chauvinism of such colleagues as Pavel Miliukov, the romantic populism of people like Annensky, Peshekhonov and Miakotin and the party's scant interest in labour issues.

The contacts to American and Western European aid agencies he forged in this capacity were later held against him, and in 1922 he was expelled from the Soviet Union.