Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/41

 our workers to express their sentiments towards Lenin. All sorts of tender names appear in telegrams. He is the "torch," he is the "beacon," he is the "beloved one," etc., but most frequently of all one name occurs in the telegrams, the clear, strong, and perhaps rather harsh word "leader." He is really the chosen one of millions. He is a leader by the grace of God; his is the genuine figure of a leader such as arises once in five hundred years in the life of the human race.

I should like to say yet a few words about Lenin's attitude on the war. He had long ceased to believe in the European Social Democracy; he knew well that something was rotten in Denmark. He had long been saying about official European Social Democrats that they were carrying on a contraband trade in rotten opportunist goods. When the war broke out we were living in a God-forsaken little mountain village in Galicia. I remember having had a bet with him. I said to him: "You will see, the German Democrats will not dare vote against the war, but will abstain in the vote on the war credits." Comrade Lenin replied: "No, they are not such scoundrels after all. They will not, of course, fight the war, but they will, to ease their conscience, vote against the credits in order that the working class might not rise against them." In this case Lenin was wrong, and so was I. Neither of us had taken the full measures of the flunkeyism of the Social Patriots. The European Social Democrats proved complete bankrupts. They all voted for the war credits. When the first number of the "Vorwaerts," the organ of the German Social Democrats, arrived with the news that they had voted the war credits, Lenin at first refused to believe, "It cannot be," he said, "it must be a forged number. Those scoundrels, the German bourgeois, have specially published such a number of the 'Vorwaerts' in order