A Child of His People and Century.
LENIN was the child of his people and of his century. When called a Jacobin he would answer: "We, the Bolsheviks, are the Jacobins of the Twentieth Century, that is, the Jacobins of the proletarian revolution," Lenin was, as we have seen, the very embodiment of the idea of internationalism, and at the same time he was part and parcel of the mighty revolutionary movement that the oppressed masses of Russia have been carrying on for years and years. He was really one link in a long chain of struggles for the emancipation of the Russian proletariat and the Russian peasantry. From Radschev, thru Belinsky, Dobroljubov, Bakunin, Tschernischevsky, Netschajev, and Jeliabov, thru the party "The Will of the People" and thru the group of "Emancipation of Labor," and thru many unknown representatives of the workers and peasants, which have been populating the prisons of the Czar and of Siberia, there runs the thread of struggle which unites Lenin with the Russian revolutionary movement. He was a man of an all-inclusive spirit; the press of our opponents would speak with irony about the utopian plans of Bolshevism. But in this irony there is to be found a profound truth. Lenin has been operating with whole continents. He was basing his policies upon the experiences of millions.
Only the limitless and vast extent of Russia could give birth to such a spirit. This youth, born to a family of state functionaries and adopted by the proletariat, embodied and gave expression to the hatred of the working class of Russia accumulated thru centuries. He also reflected in himself the hatred of the peasantry against its oppressors that accumulated thru centuries. He had a deep sense for the sufferings of the toiling masses, even when the masses could not give expression to those sufferings in words.
Lenin cannot be considered apart from the Russian workers and peasants and from the Russian history. Only within the social structure of Russia, the revolutionary struggles of whole generations, only by considering the achievements of the Russian revolutionary movement since the 18th century and up to the last day, can we locate the prime factors that have brought about the appearance of Bolshevism in Russia at the cross-roads of two centuries. Only by taking all this into consideration can we properly estimate the moral, political, national, and international physiognomy of Lenin. For us, his contemporaries, who have been living within the circle of his influence, one thing is clear.
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