Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/16

 popular exposition is a classic example of the popularization of Marxism.

At that time this was the most profitable soil for propaganda: to agitate against the system of fines, to excite economic conflicts, to raise every economic strike to the level of a political event. And Vladimir Iyitch, with all his passionate nature, gave himself up to the work. He spends his days and nights in the working-class quarters. He is hunted by the police. He has only a small circle of friends. Nearly all so-called revolutionary intellectuals of that time meet him with hostility. The time was not far distant when the Populists burned the first Marxist wriiings of Plekhanoff, on which Lenin himself was brought up.

Comrade Lenin opened up here a new path. 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.

It happens very often at the present time that from somwheresomewhere [sic] 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 al-