Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/18

 No, now is the time, secretly and under the heavy hand of Tsardom, to build up in spite of these desperately difficult conditions, an independent Socialist class party of .the workers, fighting at once both against Tsardom and against the bourgeoisie.

The manuscript of this pamphlet was got over the frontier to the group of the "Emancipation of Labor." In Switzerland there worked at this time a group consisting of Plekhanoff, Axelrod, and Zassulitch, the first founders of Social-Democracy in Russia. They had lived abroad already 15 years. When this manuscript of Lenin's came to them it was the first tidings they received of the dawning spring. And it was none other than Paul Axelrod who was at that time a Socialist, and was able to discern the true leaders of the working class, who, on the receipt of the manuscript, went into raptures. He said then to his circle of friends that a prodigious force had appeared in the ranks of our Social-Democracy, that there had arisen a new star of the greatest magnitude. Axelrod wrote a preface to Lenin's pamphlet, in which he could not find enough laudatory words with which to overwhelm Comrade Lenin. He said that for the first time since Plekhanoff there had appeared a leader, a practical expert of the working-class movement, that Lenin was a force to whom was assured an immense future.

And Axelrod, in the present case—one must give him his due—was right.

Still in exile, Comrade Lenin wrote a great scientific work, "The Development of Capitalism in Russia"—a book which ought to have become, and in a great measure did become, the inseparable companion of every worker. In this book Comrade Lenin settled accounts with the Populists, who then reigned supreme in the minds of the contemporary generation of our intelli-