Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/40

 were soon so perfected that very seldom the "Pravda" would appear without some contribution from Lenin. You have been brought up on those articles, and you know what those papers, "Zvezda" and "Pravda," were for the working class. Those were the first swallows of the coming Communist spring. Right and left Comrade Lenin hit our enemies in the columns of those papers, and it is owing to his articles, counsels, and private letters to Petrograd, that the "Pravda" soon became a sounding board for all questions of the day. Our machinery became so perfect that we frequently managed to have a conference of the Petrograd and Cracow bureaus of the central committee before every important meeting of trade unions or other labour organizations.

I remember the first large general meeting of the Petrograd Metal Workers in 1913. Two hours after the list of our candidates to the committee of the Union was adopted by the meeting (which was at that time an extraordinary success) Comrade Lenin was already in possession of congratulatory telegrams from the Metal Workers on the matter. Comrade Lenin was living at that time thousands of miles away, but he was the very soul of the proletarian Petrograd. The same thing was happening as in 1906–7, when Comrade Lenin was residing in Finland, at Kuokalla, and where weekly pilgrimages were performed by us in order to receive his advice. He was actually guiding the Labor movement at Petrograd from his little village in Finland. He was now doing the same thing from Cracow, guiding not only the Petrograd, but the whole Russian Bolshevik movement.

The telegrams which are now congratulating Lenin on his convalescence and conveying the senders' sympathy on the occassion, contain very frequently the name "leader." Many a tender word has been found by