Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Nicolai Lenin, His Life and Work (1918).djvu/53

 lived still in the memory of his people a long time after his physical life had been cut, but Lenin will live long yet, not only in our minds and hearts, but also in our ranks, in order to fight with us and to carry to a triumphant end the first Workers Socialist Revolution. (Storm of applause.)

Yes, a Marat closely connected with the millions of the town and country proletariat. That is Lenin. Take the fanatical devotion to the people which distinguished Marat; take his simplicity his intimate knowledge of the soul of the people, take his elemental faith in the inexhaustible strength of the "lower depths," take all this and add to it the first-class education of a Marxist, an iron will, an acute analytical mind, and you will get Lenin such as we know him now. A revolutionary Social Democrat is just a Jacobin who has tied up his fate with the most advanced class of modern times, with the proletariat—such was Lenin's reply in 1904 to the Mensheviks who were accussing him of Jacobism. The figure of the proletarian "Jacobin," Lenin, will yet throw into shade the glory of the most glorious of the Jacobins of the time of the Great French Revolution.

August Bebel was never forgiven by the German bourgeoisie for having once declared in the Raichstag: "I hate your bourgeois order; yes, I am a deadly enemy of your entire bourgeois society." And the same Bebel used to say: "When I am praised by the bourgeoisie, I ask myself, 'You, old fellow, what folly have you commited to have merited the praises of these cannibals?" But Comrade Lenin will never have to put himself such a question. He is quite guaranteed against that. He has never been praised by the bourgeosie who had been persecuting him with a wild hatred all during the long years of his captivity, and he is proud of it. At the moment of greatest crisis Lenin is fond of repeating, as he did on the eve of the November Revolution, the poet's words: "We hear sounds of approval not in the sweet murmur of praise, but in the wild shouts of rage." This is characteristic of Lenin, who is entirely reflected in the verses. Lenin quotes poetry but seldom, but in this case he used it with good reason. The wild shouts of rage of the enemies of the working class have ever been the best music to Lenin's ear. The greater the rage