NICOLAI LENIN
during the war, when our hearts fell (those comrades who were abroad know what it means when for years you do not hear the Russian speech when you are homesick for a native Russian word), Comrade Lenin used to say; why do you complain, is this a foreign exile? Plekhanoff and Axelrod, they were lonely in foreign exile when for the space of 25 years they strained in vain their eyesight to catch a glimpse of the first working-class revolutionary.
In point of fact, Vladimir Ilyitch himself pined in foreign exile literally like a lion in a cage. He had nothing on which to expend his immense, inexhaustible energy, and he found salvation only through leading the life of a scholar. He did that which had been done in his time by Marx. He spent about fifteen hours a day in the library and at books, and it is not for nothing that he stands out to-day as one of the most learned Marxists, and generally, one of the most cultured people of our time.
But let us return to his first sojourn abroad.
In 1901 Lenin, together with a group of then kindred persons (Martoff, Potresoff), entered upon the publication of the paper "Iskra" (The Spark). This "Iskra”" is an historical paper closely interwoven with the name of Comrade Lenin. Both friends and enemies spoke of Lenin's "Iskra." This was often the case. Everywhere, whenever and wherever Lenin worked, in organizations, as an editor in the Central Committee, or finally now in the Council of People's Commissaries to all these organizations inevitably struck the appellation "Lenin's." Yes, "Iskra" was Lenin's, and it did not lose by this, it only gained, (Applause). The first important article of Lenin in the "Iskra" was called "Where to Begin." In this article Lenin developed the entire proximate programme of the Labour movement and the Rus-
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