Grigory Zinoviev

“ Thus, in 1916, during the war, when we in Switzerland got to know that a revolutionary movement was beginning here at Petrograd, and that our comrades had begun to pass round the word about the reorganisation of the Soviets, Comrade Lenin wrote, in articles and letters, that the organisation of a Soviet was a great slogan, and must not be frivolously played with. It must only be raised when the workers were determined to go to the end; to stake their heads on victory and to proclaim that the moment of a real proletarian revolution, the moment to capture all power, had arrived. ”

“ Throughout the whole activity of Comrade Lenin one can notice that he is always an innovator, that he goes against the current, that he ploughs a new furrow in the political and social life. In the 'nineties, too, at Petrograd, it fell to his share to trace out a new path, to form, to rally the first detachments of workers, the first detachments of a genuine working-class intelligentsia, from which more than one leader of the present workers' revolution has come. ”

“ But I think, comrades, that we cannot pay a greater honor to our teacher and leader to-day than if I, who am acquainted with the biography of Comrade Lenin somewhat intimately—I have had the good fortune to work side by side with Comrade Lenin in the closest collaboration for more than ten years—if I take advantage of the present occasion in order to share, though it be only in brief, with younger friends and older comrades who have never had the opportunity of observing so closely the work of Comrade Lenin, my authentic knowledge of the life of Comrade Lenin. ”

“ You know the biography of this extraordinary proletarian of genius, who not only blew up the Winter Palace, but achieved something greater—he was the first to hoist the flag of political struggle agaist Tsardom in the name of the working class. Comrade Lenin used to say: When we have hundreds of such proletarians as Khalturin, when they are no longer solitary figures going with bomb or revolver against this or that individual monster, when they rise at the head of teeming multitudes of workers—then we shall be invincible ”

“ But Comrade Lenin steadily and quietly pursued his labors, and now things have reached such a pass that the German bourgeoisie has had to sign a treaty with Comrade Lenin as representing hundreds of millions of peasants and workers of entire Russia. We shall yet, comrades, see the moment when our proletariat through its leader Lenin will dictate its will to old Europe, when Comrade Lenin will, perhaps, make treaties with the Government of Karl Liebknecht, and when Lenin will help the German workers to draw up the first Socialist decree in Germany (applause) . ”

“ I think I shall not in any way exaggerate if I say that every honest worker in Petrograd, in the whole of Europe, indeed, even in the whole world, so far as he may have heard the news of the attempt on Comrade Lenin, had in the course of these anxious days no other thought than the one question, will the wounded leader of International Communism recover? ”

“ There were no Marxists in Petrograd, even if he searched for them in daylight with a torch. The Populists monopolised the minds of all the intellectuals, and the working class were only stretching themselves out of slumber to political life.
And now there comes this young Comrade Lenin, builds up, after a year or two, in Petrograd the first working-class organizations and rallies around himself the first Marxist intellectuals. Very soon Lenin is already in the literary arena crossing swords with the old leader of the Populists, N. K. Mikhailovsky. ”

“ He rises from bed, asks for telegrams and papers, sits down to work, and cannot forget that he is the most responsible worker in the greatest revolution in the world. (Applause.) That is why I think we shall not have the desired happiness. But we shall have the happines of another kind. We know that no Soviet, no worker, enjoys so much the infinite love and respect of Lenin as the Petrograd Soviet and the Petrograd workers. ”

“ Already in the revolution of 1905 Lenin was playing a leading part. This, to the outward gaze, was not so noticeable at that time, as it has been in the present revolution. You are aware that the first Petrograd Soviet of the Workers' Delegates in 1905 was formed by the Mensheviks, but in all its practical actions it followed, as a rule, the lead of the Bolsheviks. When the tide rose and the waters flooded the banks, the working class became aware that to form Soviets was virtually the same thing as to fight for power. Thereby the working class became Bolshevik. ”

“ A revolutionary Social Democrat is just a Jacobin who has tied up his fate with the most advanced class of modern times, with the proletariat—such was Lenin's reply in 1904 to the Mensheviks who were accussing him of Jacobism. The figure of the proletarian "Jacobin," Lenin, will yet throw into shade the glory of the most glorious of the Jacobins of the time of the Great French Revolution.
August Bebel was never forgiven by the German bourgeoisie for having once declared in the Raichstag: "I hate your bourgeois order; yes, I am a deadly enemy of your entire bourgeois society." ”

“ Peter Struve perhaps did not even realise it himself, and regarded himself as a genuine partisan of the Labour movement, but that in his modernism one could detect the very old tunes of the bourgeoisie. You are a bourgeois ideologist (Lenin argued) , you will inevitably go over to the camp of the bourgeoisie and break with the working class. You yourself bear the guilt of this, because you look upon the working class as a means and not as an end, It is only important to you as a force against the Tsar, and you wish to make use of it, without giving it anything in return. ”

“ Still in exile, Comrade Lenin wrote a great scientific work, "The Development of Capitalism in Russia"—a book which ought to have become, and in a great measure did become, the inseparable companion of every worker. In this book Comrade Lenin settled accounts with the Populists, who then reigned supreme in the minds of the contemporary generation of our intelligentsia. He brilliantly proved in this work that Plekhanoff was right when he asserted that Russia also would not escape the stage of capitalism. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fifteen years before, when the party of the Social-Revolutionaries had only just been born, when it had in its ranks well-known members of the late "People's Will," when we had not yet that great political experience which was given to us by the revolution—what was then the position? There comes forward the party of the Social-Revolutionaries, asserting that it is fighting for Socialism, saying that it is more to the Left than the "Iskra." And lo! there gets up Comrade Lenin still quite young, and in face of the whole world dares throw at them the scornful words: "revolutionary adventurers." ”

“ It was Lenin who was fated to save Petrograd, Russia, our party, our revolution. Now there are but few clever persons who would attempt to ridicule Lenin's theory of "breathing-space." It is now clear to everybody that it was the only right thing to do, to yield to the enemies space in order to gain time...
That is why the man who has accomplished such work is entitled to immortality. That is why a blow directed against him is received by everybody as a blow directed against themselves. ”

“ The wild shouts of rage of the enemies of the working class have ever been the best music to Lenin's ear. The greater the rage of the enemies, the more assured Lenin is. Again, Lenin is fond of comparing our revolution with a rushing railway engine. ”

“ We are not to defer (Lenin argued) the formation of working class parties in Russia until we have won political freedom. No, we have not lagged behind Europe a hundred years in order to hang back with the organization of labor parties until our bourgeoisie has risen to power. No, now is the time, secretly and under the heavy hand of Tsardom, to build up in spite of these desperately difficult conditions, an independent Socialist class party of .the workers, fighting at once both against Tsardom and against the bourgeoisie. ”

“ Lenin, since the time when he awakened to a conscious political life, has never shared the Populist theories. He first became prominent when he began to fight against revolutionary Populism. He was the very antipodes of Mikhailovsky. He gained his first laurels as a Socialist precisely through the struggle against Populism. But nobody had so great a respect, no one ever taught the workers to respect these first fighters against Tsarism as Vladimir Ilyitch. ”

“ The Soviet State has found in Lenin not only its chief political leader, practical organiser, ardent propagandist, poet and singer, but also its principal theoretician, its Karl Marx. The November revolution—in so far as even in a revolution one may, and indeed must speak of the part played by the individual—as well as the part played in connection with it by our party—are to the extent of nine-tenths the work of Lenin. ”

“ But who will now laugh when we say that the leader of the Third International is none else than Lenin? The compromise-mongers have now no inclination to laugh. They would rather cry, because they know that the Third International is_a living fact, although owing to the state of siege it has not come into existence formally. And they also know that the new International has in the person of Lenin a sufficiently strong leader, far-seeing, courageous, such as the working class Iternational properly needs. ”

“ I said to him: "You will see, the German Democrats will not dare vote against the war, but will abstain in the vote on the war credits." Comrade Lenin replied: "No, they are not such scoundrels after all. They will not, of course, fight the war, but they will, to ease their conscience, vote against the credits in order that the working class might not rise against them." In this case Lenin was wrong, and so was I. Neither of us had taken the full measures of the flunkeyism of the Social Patriots. The European Social Democrats proved complete bankrupts. They all voted for the war credits. ”

“ This book was criticised by Plekhanoff and Lenin. Plekhanoff criticised it with the brilliance, peculiar to him, of a literary academician; Lenin criticised it differently. I feel and know, said Lenin, that in a year or two Struve will leave the working class and betray us to the bourgeoisie. Struve's book ended with the words: "Let us aknowledge our want of culture and place ourselves as apprentices under capitalism." These words need thinking over, said Lenin. See if this Struve does not end in becoming an apprentice, not of capitalism, but of capitalists. ”

“ Lenin assiduously, step by step, collected a secret organization, and in 1903 we reached already the third congress of the party. Already in that historic congress, when the party was still united, when in its ranks stood Plekhanoff, Zassulitch, Axelrod, Martoff, Potressoff and others, already it became clear from the first minute of its labors that the true leader of our young party was Comrade Lenin.
Comrade Lenin is often represented as a man who cuts, carves, uses nothing but the surgeon's knife, who does not spare the unity of the proletarian ranks. ”

“ What Lenin was insisting upon was that the Soviets wery not the ordinary class organisation, whose purpose, according to the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, was to fight for the economic demands of the working class on the basis of capitalism only. ”

“ Attempts were made to smuggle, under the flag of Marxism, the ideas of bourgeois philosophy into working-class audiences. Lenin spent two years in the Paris National Library, and carried out such a mass of work that even bourgeois professors who attempted to sneer at the philosophical studies of Lenin, themselves admitted that they could not understand how one man had contrived to read such a mass of books in the course of two years. ”

“ Then, and then only, was it permissible to speak about Soviets, since Soviets could only exist if the workers assumed all power, since the Soviets were the form of a proletarian state, since the Soviets were the undivided rule of the working class. ”

“ It happens very often at the present time that from somwhere out of far Siberia or the Urals there come to the Council of People's Commissaries, or to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, workers who are at present presidents of local Soviets or leaders of the local movement. They go up to Comrade Lenin and begin to call up old memories: "Do you remember in the early 'nineties, at such and such a place, how we stirred up an agitation for the supply of hot water for tea with a certain illegal leaflet, or organized such and such a strike?" Comrade Lenin does not always remember them ”