Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/32

 ing a new page in the history of the international proletariat, in the history of the entire human race. (Applause.)

No one was more interested in the history of the Petrograd Soviet than Comrade Lenin. Though he formally had taken the least direct part in its labours, he, nevertheless, appreciated better than any of us what it meant. For that reason he treated the Soviet watch-word with the utmost circumspection. Thus, in 1916, during the war, when we in Switzerland got to know that a revolutionary movement was beginning here at Petrograd, and that our comrades had begun to pass round the word about the reorganisation of the Soviets, Comrade Lenin wrote, in articles and letters, that the organisation of a Soviet was a great slogan, and must not be frivolously played with. It must only be raised when the workers were determined to go to the end; to stake their heads on victory and to proclaim that the moment of a real proletarian revolution, the moment to capture all power, had arrived. Then, and then only, was it permissible to speak about Soviets, since Soviets could only exist if the workers assumed all power, since the Soviets were the form of a proletarian state, since the Soviets were the undivided rule of the working class.

What Lenin was insisting upon was that the Soviets werywere [sic] not the ordinary class organisation, whose purpose, according to the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, was to fight for the economic demands of the working class on the basis of capitalism only. In his opinion such Soviets would be doomed in advance. In fact, no Soviets were needed for such a purpose. In his view, the Soviets were organisations for the seizure of State power, and for transforming the workers into the ruling class. That is why he again and again told the Petrograd workers in the course of 1916: "Ask