For the bourgeois world the ideas of Lenin were really grey. But how did the international working class movement respond to his ideas? Millions of people understood his thots because they were simple and within the grasp of the masses. They were in harmony with the class instincts of these masses, if not always with their conscious understanding. But the true greatness of Lenin's "grey ideas" could be seen only after these ideas had been transformed into "red actions."
When at the end of 1914 Lenin spoke of the necessity of putting up the civil war against the imperialist war, not even the left wing could follow the trend of his thots. He therefore organized at Zimmerwald a left wing which assumed definite form only at Kienthal. But even after the conference at Kienthal one of its participants, the French delegate Brisson, spoke of Lenin as of a queer sort of fellow who had been making publicly very childish propositions.
From the very beginning Lenin had a very clear idea as to what results the imperialist war would bring to humanity, and that the capitalist world would under no circumstances be able to avoid civil war. This explains his radical slogans. But the international labor movement had been developing very slowly. It had to have a few more years of war before the masses would come back to their senses. And this had been Lenin's task, to awaken the masses to revolutionary action altho he was very little known to the wide proletarian masses.
After the February Revolution the patriotic henchmen of all countries started a campaign of vilification against Lenin as an agent of the German General Staff. This story found wide circulation also among social-democratic circles. Only after the October Revolution did the masses come to learn the part played by Lenin at Zimmerwald and Kienthal where he demanded that the working class be aroused against the imperialist war. Only after he assumed the leadership of the greatest revolution in the history of the world did the masses come to know who Lenin really was. And since then the international labor movement has been divided into two groups as far as Lenin was concerned, enthusiastic friends and deadly enemies.
Every day of the existence of Soviet Russia, every attack against Russia by its enemies, have contributed towards the increase of Lenin's popularity among the masses, thereby raising the importance of those organizations (the Communist International and the Red International of Labor Unions) whose fate was bound up with that of Soviet Russia.
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