Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/24

 gets up Comrade Lenin still quite young, and in face of the whole world dares throw at them the scornful words: "revolutionary adventurers." Lenin declared: "You, gentlemen of the Social-Revolutionaries, are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie and nothing more." (Applause).

When Lenin said that the party of the Social-Revolutionaries was a party of the petty bourgeoisie there descended upon him thunder and lightning. It was said that Lenin was a bad character that he was as a misanthropist, and so forth. Now, indeed, you can see that it was a prophetic anticipation of that which is. (Applause). Now we know that there are no two more fateful letters in the Russian alphabet than the letters: S. R. Why is the destiny of this party so fateful? Because calling itself Socialist, in reality it is a petty bourgeois party. Comrade Lenin was right when he said that these were no Socialists, but representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, that at best they were only revolutionary romantics, phantasists, and nothing more.

Now we have an immense, and precious experience of a decade and a half, the experience of the revolution of the year 1905, the experience of the revolution of the years 1917–18. But to have predicted the real truth fifteen years ago, to have determined the real value of the party of the Social-Revolutionaries at that time—this required almost a prophetic gift. For this it was necessary to have an immense revolutionary Marxist intuition, for this, in a word, it was necessary to be a Lenin. (Applause).

Lenin's "Iskra" carried on not merely a political fight, it also carried on an immense work of organization. The "Iskra" was gathering the scattered debris of our party. Only in the beginning of the 'nineties arose a situation in which it was possible to think of