Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/12

 tered the faculty of Laws at Kazan University. The universities of the capitals were closed to him as the brother of an executed terrorist. A student however, Vladimir Ilyitch remained but a very short while. At the end of a month they ejected him for taking part in the students' revolutionary movement. Only after the lapse of four years was it possible for him to take his final examinations.

The legal career, however, had no attractions for Comrade Lenin. Vladimir Ilyitch always spoke in very humorous terms of his few days of "practice" at the bar. Comrade Lenin's predilections lay in an entirely different direction, He yearned after revolutionary activities.

Comrade Lenin stands, as it were, on the borderland between the old school of populist revolutionaries and the new school of revolutionary Marxists. Comrade Lenin himself took part in the student populist associations, but already, even at that time, he stood with one foot in the camp of the Marxists.

Vladimir Ilyitch however, was bound by ties of blood with the early generation of revolutionary terrorists, those glorious fighters whose names to this day shine like dazzling stars—because they laid low not the friends of the people, like the wretched Right Socialist Revolutionaries, but the tyrants and oppressors of the people. Vladimir Ilyitch is related by blood to this race of fighters. He is connected with them through his brother Alexander Ilyitch Ulianoff, who was one of the chief promoters of the Narodnya Volya, (People's Will), and who was on that account hanged by the Tsar's Government in the year 1887.

Comrade Lenin himself was never a member of that party. But he has always inculcated upon us the most ardent respect for this cluster of brilliant revolu-