Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/28

 time the Mensheviks had in their hands a tremendous machinery, as well as the whole authority of Plekhanoff and other saints, innumerable papers and pamphlets as well as the central committee, the central organ and the council of the party. Comrade Lenin began to bombard this Menshevik fortress from his little machine-gun called "Vperiod." He fired so far, and he aimed so well, that in a pretty short time not a trace was left of Plekhanoff's heavy artillery, and by 1905 it became quite obvious that all that was alive in the Russian proletariat would follow the Bolsheviks.

In the summer of 1905 the first congress of the Bolsheviks (its official name was the third congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) took place, the first historical meeting which laid the foundations of the present Communist Party. It was at that meeting that Lenin for the first time observed that in the forthcoming revolution we would no longer stop to form a burgeoisbourgeois [sic] republic. Already at that time Comrade Lenin spoke about the rottenness of the European Social Democratic parliamentarism. Already at that time Lenin expressed the view that our revolution would stand on the border between the bourgeois and Socialist revolution.

It was difficult in those days to be a Bolshevik. Not only the Russian, but also the international conditions, pressed heavily upon us. Bebel, for instance, who was respected by Lenin as a working class leader of genius, would use every suitable and unsuitable occassion to reproach Lenin for being against Plekhanoff. How could Plekhanoff ever be an opportunist? At the same time Axelrod was busy telling everybody who was inclined