NICOLAI LENIN
jects as that "a reward would be offered of half a kingdom to the person who could name a fourth Bolshevik in addition to Lenin, Zinovieff, and Kameneff". The Bolsheviks were, forsooth, a set of bears sucking their own paws while life was moving past them, The co-operatives, the trade unions, the censored press, were all opposed to the Bolsheviks, while Lenin and his desciples were sitting in a contemplative mood, attaching their faith to the advent of a new Messiah and a new revolution which would never arrive.
In those difficult times Lenin rendered to the working class services perhaps even greater than ever before, At present, in our own days, a tremendous flood has risen and borne millions of individuals, ready to fight and to die. In those days everything was asleep, like in a cemetery. Stolypin's regime was weighing upon the working class like the lid of a coffin. The "older statesmen," after the type of Axelrod and Co., were chanting the dirges of the revolution and of the old illegal Labor Party. It was, indeed, a great merit to have raised the banner of the revolution in such times, to have fought all the Revisionism and Opportunism, to have preserved his faith. in triumph, and awaited its moment; to have worked and worked without rest or haste.
Lenin was fighting for the party, but at the same time he secluded himself in the library. It is needless to say that Marx has ever been the favorite writer of Lenin, just as his favorite Russian author has always been Chernishevsky.[1] Lenin knows his Marx and Engels from the first to the last letter. He knows them in a way as only two or three persons, I think, know them in the world. And Lenin is one of the very few who have advaced the theory of Marx and have been
- ↑ A great Russian Socialist thinker (1828–89).—Trans.
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