NICOLAI LENIN
yourselves a hundred times whether you are prepared, whether you are strong enough; look carefully before you jump. To organise Soviets means to declare a war to a finish, to declare civil war upon the bourgeoisie, to begin the proletarian revolution." And Comrade Lenin has remained faithful and true to himself in his view.
***
But let us go back. The year 1906 was followed by a period of stagnation, by the dark era of the counter-revolution. The working class was digesting the lessons of the first revolution. In reply to the Menshevik philosophy of the first revolution and the causes of its defeat, we gave our own philosophy of the revolution. We were obliged to give it in our "underground" papers, leaflets, and pamphlets. We were not in a position to publish, with the sanction of the censorship, five big volumes, as the Mensheviks did. We should not have found any publisher, we should have been boycotted by the entire censored press, and, in fact, we should not have been allowed to say a single word by the Tsar's censorship. Lenin at that time was depicted as a sort of monster who could have no place in respectable society.
We Bolsheviks were not at that time allowed to come out in the "legal" literature. We could only help ourselves by means of the free printing press abroad.
The Mensheviks at that time represented the entire revolution of 1905 as a wholesale error, as a wholesale chaos, and elemental madness. The workers, forsooth, were themselves responsible for the defeat, because they had gone "too far" in their demands. Lenin's reply was: "You have failed to grasp the meaning of this movement! It was a great revolution, and by no means a chaos. It was a great revolution, not because
— 26 —
