Lev Grigorievich Deutsch, also known as Leo Deutsch () (September 26, 1855 – August 5, 1941) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and one of four founding members of Russia's Marxist Organisation, the precursor of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Biography Early life and political activities Lev Grigorievich Deutsch was born September 25, 1855 in Tulchyn, Russia, the son of a Jewish merchant father and a peasant mother. At the age of 19, he joined a Narodnik group in Kiev, and took part in the 'to the people' movement, in which young radicals dressed as peasants, and went to villages to spread socialist ideas. He avoided arrest, unlike many of the participants, but returned, disillusioned in the summer of 1875 and volunteered to join the infantry, hoping to be sent to the Balkans to fight the Turks, but in February 1876, he was implicated in helping a revolutionary named Semyon Lurie, one of the defendants at the Trial of the 193 to escape from Kiev prison, and deserted, to avoid a court martial. He joined an illegal group known as the Kiev buntari. In June 1876, Deutsch was living illegally in Elisavetgrad when a former student named Gorinovich sought to join his group. Gorinovich had been arrested for taking part in the 'to the people' movement in 1874, but was released. Deutsch believed that he had gained his release by denouncing others, and was an active police spy, and resolved to kill him. He and a fellow revolutionary, V.A.Malinka, persuaded Gorinovich to join them on a trip to Odessa, and on the way attacked him and left him for dead, though he recovered and named his attackers. Malinka was hanged for his part in attack in December 1878. This was the first act of violence committed by Russian revolutionaries during the 1870s, and made Deutsch so notorious that when a young Jewish woman was arrested as one of the conspirators who had assassinated the Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the Russian press wrongly assumed that she was Deutsch's sister. In summer 1877, he was arrested as an accomplice of Yakov Stefanovich in the Chigirin Affair and held in Kiev prison, but both men escaped in May 1878 after a fellow revolutionary, Mikhail Frolenko, had obtained a post as a prison warden and let them out one night. Deutsch escaped to Europe, but returned to St Petersburg, and - despite his