Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/19

 gentsia. He brilliantly proved in this work that Plekhanoff was right when he asserted that Russia also would not escape the stage of capitalism. By means of statistics he showed that our country had since the 'nineties entered upon the capitalist stage. He gave a profound and subtle analysis of the development of agriculture in Russia and the invasion of it by capitalism, With the aid of a mighty array of facts, Comrade LeinLenin [sic] analysed the whole economic structure of the country, both in the towns and on the land; and out of this dispassionate matter-of-fact analysis he brought out the revolutionary conclusions regarding the problems and tasks of the working class.

This book of Lenin's was acknowleged by bourgeois professors as a great scientific achievement. I myself, in 1902, when I was still a student in Paris, in the School of Social Sciences, founded by Professor Kovalevsky and others heard from Professor Maxim Kovalevsky the greatest eulogy of Vladimir Ilyitch from his point of view. He said: "What a fine profesor might have been made out of Lenin!" This in the mouth of Professor Kovalevsky was the very highest praise. Yes! out of Comrade Lenin there might have been made a fine professor, but out of him came the leader of the workers' Commune, and this, I think, is something greater than the most gifted of gifted professors. (Applause).

During the same period of exile and on the eve of the day when he was obliged to journey out into exile, Comrade Lenin began another struggle on a different front. Fighting with one hand against the Populists in the person of Mikhailovsky and others, he then began a theoretical struggle against the so-called "legal" Marxism. At its head stood P. Struve, Tugan-Baranovsky and others who at present are leaders of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. This movement had