Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/20

 a profound social foundation. The Liberals of the day were seeking a stratum of society on which they could lean in their struggle against Tsarism for bourgeois freedom. And they saw that outside the working class there was none at all. They saw that the Populists, with their old fashioned "theories," asserting that we should never have capitalism, were clearly in the wrong. And they began to set their cap at Marxism, emasculating it of its revolutionary spirit and turning it into a "legal," tame Marxism.

In this struggle against the Populists the legal Marxists were for a time our allies. They also, like ourselves, fought against Mikhailovsky. And at one time we were united with them in a definite bloc. But the sharp ear of Comrade Lenin had already discovered false notes in the very first writings of P. Struve and Co. Lenin immediately said that this was an ally only for the nonce, that they would in the end betray us.

Noteworthy is the criticism by which Comrade Lenin exposed the well-known book of P. Struve, "Critical Remarks." Struve had for a long time been regarded as a Social-Democrat. He published a very sensational book, "Critical Remarks," directed against Mikhailovsky. This book was criticised by Plekhanoff and Lenin. Plekhanoff criticised it with the brilliance, peculiar to him, of a literary academician; Lenin criticised it differently. I feel and know, said Lenin, that in a year or two Struve will leave the working class and betray us to the bourgeoisie. Struve's book ended with the words: "Let us aknowledge our want of culture and place ourselves as apprentices under capitalism." These words need thinking over, said Lenin. See if this Struve does not end in becoming an apprentice, not of capitalism, but of capitalists. And though Struve was the comrade of Lenin, and rendered priceless services both to him