Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/14

 sonally, he kewknew [sic] him by hearsay and books, as we know him ourselves. 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 agaistagainst [sic] 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; then will come an end to Tsardom, and with it an end also to the rule of the bourgeoisie.

Comrade Lenin's affection for proletarians who in any way show capacity is especially striking. A fighter whom Lenin always valued and loved was the workman Ivan Vasilyevitch Babushkin, with whom Comrade Lenin here, in Petrograd began his work in the 'nineties together starting the first working-class organizations, together leading the first workers' strikes, together taking their part in the organization of the "Iskra." This comrade played a prominent part in the revolution of 1905 and it was only by accident that in 1907 Vladimir Ilyitch learned from friends among the Siberian exiles that Babushkin had been shot by General Rennenkampf in Siberia.

I. V. Babushkin and Shelgunoff who is still living and who is known to the Petrograd proletarians (he has now grown blind)—these renowned fighters, coming out of the working class Comrade Lenin loved like brothers, placed them before us as an example, saw in them the real fore-runners, the true leaders of the dawning workers' revolution.

The first period of activity of Comrade Lenin, as of many other revolutionaries who sprang from among the ranks of the intelligentsia, was passed in student