Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/15

 circles. When Comrade Lenin was expelled from Kazan University he went to Petrograd. And he used to tell us how, having already caught the Marxist infection in Samara, he walked about Petrograd searching for a Marxist. Vivos voco! But the "tribe" of Marxists was at that time extremely few. 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.

Lenin (under the pseudonym of Ilyin) comes forward with a series of brilliant economic articles which at once win for him a name. And immediately in the ranks of the Populist intelligentsia there could be observed a certain alarm. Somebody powerful and strong has disturbed the petty bourgeois pool. The movement of the water begins. On the horizon a new figure has appeared. Someone is stirring up the stagnant air, and there is a breath of newness. freshness. In Petrograd, Comrade Lenin, together with some other followers of Marx and the working men of whom I have spoken, builds up the "Union of the Struggle for the Emancipation of Labor." He was entrusted by this organization with the conduct of the first working-class strikes, and wrote the first simple, unassuming, hectographed leaflets in which were formulated the economic demands, of the Petrograd workers. It was at this time that Lenin published his first illegal pamphlet "On Fines"—a pamphlet already forgotten, but which for lucid and