Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/31

 and what had been the reason for its defeat, For Lenin realised to perfection that the Moscow insurrection was the first outpost skirmish with the bourgeois world. He realized the world-historical consequences of the Moscow insurrection, crushed and drowned in the blood of the workers, yet the first glorious working-class revolt against Tsardom and capitalism in a most backward country.

I repeat that the part played by Lenin in the revolution of 1905 was colossal. He only attended the meetings of the Petrograd Soviet once or twice, and he would often tell us how he sat in the balcony high up and unperceived by the public, looking down on the workers' delegates assembled in the hall of the Free Economic Society. He lived at that time in Petrograd in hiding, the party having forbidden him to come out to much in the open. Our official representative on the central committee of the Soviet was A. A. Bogdanoff. When it became known that the Soviet was going to be arrested, we forbade Lenin to attend the last historical session in order that he might not be arrested. He only saw the Soviet in 1905 once or twice, but I am firmly of the opinion that even then, when he was looking down from his seat in the balcony upon the first Labor Parliament, the idea of the Soviet State must have already been dawning upon his mind. Perhaps, in those days he already foresaw, in a dream as it were, the time when there would be a Soviet State; when the Soviets, that prototype of a Socialist proletarian State, would become the sole authority in the country.

Already in those days of 1905 Lenin was teaching that the Soviets were not a fortuitous organisation which had sprung up the day before yesterday and would vanish the day after to-morrow; that they were not a common every-day organisation somewhat similar to a trade union, but an organisation which was open-