NICOLAI LENIN
and knew that it was the gospel of the adherents of the "Iskra." In face of this, Plekhanoff attempted, in his conversations with us, to pour ridicule upon Lenin. He would say: "You are going after him, but he has taken up such a line that in a few weeks he will only be fit to be put up as a scare-crow in the orchards. Lenin has raised the banner of revolt against me, Plekhanoff against Zassulitch and Deutch. Don't you understand that this is an unequal fight? Lenin is practically a dead man from the moment that he broke away from us, the leaders, the group of "Emancipation of Labor"; he is coming to the end of his tether." Such were Plekhanoff's arguments, and they no doubt made a certain impression upon us, the youngsters. Plekhanoff, while speaking, was severely contracting his eye-brows, and we felt very frightened. We would go to Comrade Lenin and innocently complain to him: "This and that is what Plekhanoff was saying." Then he would laugh and would console us: "He laughs best who laughs last; we shall yet fight, we shall see whom the workers will follow."
"One step forward, two steps backward"—such was the characteristic which Lenin gave of the evolution of the Menshevik wing of the party. One step forward—that was the advance from Economism to Iskraism; two steps back—that was the retrogression from Iskraism to the liberal ideas of "legal" Marxism which had found their resurrection in Menshevism. No wonder Comrade Lenin took up a merciless fight against this relapse into the opportunist malady. As a counter-weight to the new "Iskra," which passed into the hands of the Mensheviks, and of which Lenin ceased to be co-editor, he established the first Bolshevik paper "Vperiod" (Forward). It was at first a very small sheet which was published on the pennies collected abroad. At that
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