NICOLAI LENIN
last twenty years." But we replied: "We know Martoff as well as you and we are certain that all that is honest among the Russian workers will follow us and will oppose the war, while Martoff is championing bourgeois ideas."
But, of course, all these petty incidents are of no particular importance. I only mention them to show you how dead, how stagnant was the European Social Democracy at the beginning of the war. No one was prepared to fight. All had become habituated to the old tracks of legalism and parliamentarism; all the old leaders had faith in "law," and made of it a fetish. Tremendous efforts were needed to make an impression even among the Zimmerwaldians. I remember a clash at Zimmerwald between Lenin and Ledebour. Ledebour argued: "It is all right for you here living abroad to issue appeals for a civil war, I should have liked to see how you would have done it if you had lived in Russia." If Ledebour still remembers those words, I think he must feel very much ashamed of them now. But Comrade Lenin cooly replied to him: "When Marx was drawing up his Communist Manifesto he also was living abroad, and only narrow-minded philistines could reproach him for that. I now live abroad, because I was sent here by the Russian workers, but when the time arrives, we shall know how to stand at our posts. …"
And our Comrade Lenin kept his word.
Yet at the beginning of the war Lenin found very little sympathy even among those Socialists who were opposed to the war. But how is it now? At present we can say without exageration that all that is honest in the International regards Lenin as its leader and banner-bearer. Laazzari, the leader of the Italian workers, who has grown grey under the red banner, and who at Zimmerwald was fighting Lenin, is now going to prison
— 37 —
