Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/51

 policy, the decisive word was said by Lenin. He alone drew up in all its details the scheme of practical measures in all these domains long before November 7th. Clearness, precision, concreteness—such are the chief features in Lenin's work, and he alone has generalised all these individual measures in his work on the "State," which, to my mind, is the most important one after Marx's "Capital," The Soviet State has found in Lenin not only its chief political leader, practical organiser, ardent propagandist, poet and singer, but also its principal theoretician, its Karl Marx. The November revolution—in so far as even in a revolution one may, and indeed must speak of the part played by the individual—as well as the part played in connection with it by our party—are to the extent of nine-tenths the work of Lenin. If anybody could bring into line all those who doubted or hesitated, it was Lenin.

I can say this for myself, that if I shall repent in my life of anything, it will not be of the fifteen years that I have been working under the guidance of Comrade Lenin, but of those few November days when I thought that Lenin was too much in a hurry, was forcing events, was committing a mistake, and that I would have to oppose him. It is now as clear as noonday that if the working class, under the guidance of Lenin, had not seized power in time, we should, a few weeks later, have had the dictatorship of the most ruthless, most unscrupulous bourgeois rascals, (Loud and continued applause.) It is known now that it had been decided to massacre us all by the time of the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, and if the generals had had more soldiers at their disposal, they would have done so. Even after November 7th the Right Socialist Revolutionaries intended to massacre us, and one of their members, Massloff, even recruited soldiers for the purpose. He admitted very recently himself, that he had succeeded in scraping together only 5,000 champions of a very doubtful quality. There was the will, but there was not the way.

Comrade Lenin calculated the moment to perfection. He did not want to delay even for a week, and knew how to raise the question to a direct issue. He wrote article after article, publicly, over his signature,