Engels, in response to Our Differences (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/letters/85_04_23.htm):

“Well now, if ever Blanquism—the phantasy of overturning an entire society through the action of a small conspiracy—had a certain justification for its existence, that is certainly in Petersburg. Once the spark has been put to the powder, once the forces have been released and national energy has been transformed from potential into kinetic energy (another favourite image of Plekhanov’s and a very good one)—the people who laid the spark to the mine will be swept away by the explosion, which will be a thousand times as strong as themselves and which will seek its vent where it can, according as the economic forces and resistances determine.

“Supposing these people imagine they can seize power, what does it matter? Provided they make the hole which will shatter the dyke, the flood itself will soon rob them of their illusions. But if by chance these illusions resulted in giving them a superior force of will, why complain of that? People who boasted that they had made a revolution have always seen the next day that they had no idea what they were doing, that the revolution made did not in the least resemble the one they would have liked to make. That is what Hegel calls the irony of history, an irony which few historic personalities escape. Look at Bismarck, the revolutionary against his will, and Gladstone who has ended in quarrelling with his adored Tsar.

“To me the most important thing is that the impulse should be given in Russia, that the revolution should break out. Whether this fraction or that fraction gives the signal, whether it happens under this flag or that flag matters little to me. If it were a palace conspiracy it would be swept away tomorrow. There where the position is so strained, where the revolutionary elements are accumulated to such a degree, where the economic situation of the enormous mass of the people becomes daily more impossible, where every stage of social development is represented, from the primitive commune to modern large-scale industry and high finance, and where all these contradictions are violently held together by an unexampled despotism, a despotism which is becoming more and more unbearable to the youth in whom the national worth and intelligence are united—there, when 1789 has once been launched, 1793 will not be long in following.

Engels on Plekhanov’s works translated to Bulgarian: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_06_09.htm

Marxists in Bulgaria and Romania “answer the enticements and threats of Russian Tsarism by countering the tsarist proclamations with socialist works written by the Russian champions of the proletariat. It has given me great pleasure to see Plekhanov’s works translated into Bulgarian.”

Plekhanov, Translation of Communist Manifesto, 1882, preface by Marx and Engels.

Engels to Plekhanov, May 21st, 1894:(https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_05_21.htm)

“As you see, it is the Trade Union that will enter Parliament. It is the branch of industry and not the class that demands representation. Still, it is a step forward. Let us first smash the enslavement of the workers to the two big bourgeois parties, let us have textile workers in Parliament just as we already have miners there. As soon as a dozen branches of industry are represented class consciousness will arise of itself…

“…  The only thing is that the “practical” English will be the last to arrive, but when they do arrive their contribution will weigh quite heavy in the scale.”

(Disagreement) Lenin’s Editorial Introduction to the 1907 First Edition Letters to Dr. Kugelmann
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/unknown/x01.htm (3 of 6) [26/08/2000 00:32:41]

“Plekhanov, who after December 1905 faint-heartedly exclaimed: “They should not have taken up arms”, had the modesty to compare himself to Marx. Marx, he says, also put the brakes on the revolution in 1870.

“Yes, Marx also put the brakes on the revolution. But see what a gulf lies between Plekhanov and Marx, in Plekhanov’s own comparison!

“In November 1905, a month before the first revolutionary wave in Russia had reached its climax, Plekhanov, far from emphatically warning the proletariat, spoke directly of the necessity to learn to use arms and to arm. Yet, when the struggle flared up a month later, Plekhanov, without making the slightest attempt to analyze its significance, its role in the general course of events and its connection with previous forms of struggle, hastened to play the part of a penitent intellectual and exclaimed: “They should not have taken up arms.”
“In September 1870, six months before the Commune, Marx gave a direct warning to the French workers: insurrection would be an act of desperate folly, he said in the well-known Address of the International.  He exposed in advance the nationalistic illusions of the possibility of a movement in the spirit of 1792.  He was able to say, not after the event, but many months before: “Don’t take up arms.”