Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/13

 tionary workers, the first generation of Populist revolutionaries. 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.

In the eyes of Comrade Lenin, such workers as Zhelyaboff and Sophie Perovskaya stood transcendently high—people who raised the flag of revolt and went forward with bomb and revolver against the Tsar at the end of the 'seventies and in the beginning of the 'eighties, when Russia was a prison-house of nations, when every friend of freedom drew breath in pain, when the workers of Russia were still only beginning to form themselves into a class. Vladimir Ilyitch well understood how great and immeasurable were the services of the first heralds of the Russian revolution.

And Comrade Lenin did not reject this heritage. He said: This heritage belongs to us and to us only. Our task is to carry further that work which was begun by Zhelyaboff. Zhelyaboff, by placing himself on the side of the working class and first raising the question of the Socialist revolution, was, in fact, a Bolshevik; a Communist. In order to do the work of Zhelyaboff under new social conditions we must become revolutionary Marxists, our hearts must beat as one with the working class, the only revolutionary class of our time, that class which is not able to win freedom for itself without freeing the whole world.

Vladimir Ilyitch specially loved and was proud of the figure of the first great working-class leader, the carpenter Stepan Khalturin. Lenin did not know him per-