Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/26

 the first minute of its labors that the true leader of our young party was Comrade Lenin.

Comrade Lenin is often represented as a man who cuts, carves, uses nothing but the surgeon's knife, who does not spare the unity of the proletarian ranks. But when the first signs of a fundamental split became apparent at the second congress it was Comrade Lenin who at first used all his influence to prevent a rupture. Lenin, indeed, knew how to value the unity of the labor movement.

Only that unity was to be a unity for the struggle for Socialism. The ideas of Socialism were to him dearest above all. And so at the second congress, as soon as he saw that his divergence from Martoff, Axelrod and the others was not a slight casual divergence; that there was a resurrection of the old opportunist tendency under a new flag; that there was rising again that same "legal" Marxism which Lenin had fought at the end of the 'nineties, that his former friend Martoff, with whom he had been intimate, his bosom friend, with whom he had been together in exile, that this Martoff began to sing flat; that Plekhanoff, whom until that time he had highly valued, began to surrender the principles of Marxism; that this Plekhanoff was already giving a finger to opportunism and opportunism would soon have his whole hand; when Lenin saw all this, then the question was decided for him irrevocably. He said: "I shall stand alone, but I raise the standard of revolutionary Marxism," And he separated from Plekhanoff.

I happened at the time to be abroad. I as a young Social-Democrat, and two of my friends, were introduced to Plekhanoff. We were still young, quite fledglings, but we sympathized with all our heart with Comrade Lenin. We read his "What is to be Done?"