 By 1881, both Marx and Engels began to contemplate a course of development in Russia that would lead directly to the communist stage without the intervening bourgeois stage.This analysis was based on what Marx and Engels saw as the exceptional characteristics of the Russian village commune or obshchina.Although doubt was cast on this theory by Georgi Plekhanov, Plekhanov's reasoning was based on the first edition of "Das Kapital" (1867), which predated Marx's interest in Russian peasant communes by two years.