Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 16 - From Marx to Mao

IVAN VASILYEVICH BABUSHKIN363soldiers who saw it and railwaymen who were in the sametrain. Babushkin fell a victim to the bestial savagery of thetsarist myrmidon but, in dying, he knew that the cause towhich he had devoted his life would not die, that it wouldbe continued by tens, hundreds of thousands, millions ofother hands, that other working-class comrades would diefor the same cause, that they would fight until they werevictorious....* **Some people have concocted and are spreading a fairytaleto the effect that the Russian Social-Democratic LabourParty is a party of “intellectuals”, that the workers are isolatedfrom it, that the workers in Russia are Social-Democratswithout a Social-Democratic party, that this wasthe case particularly before the revolution and, to a considerableextent, during the revolution. The liberals arespreading this lie out of hatred for the revolutionarymass struggle which the R.S.D.L.P. led in 1905, and somesocialists have been repeating this lying theory either outof ignorance or irresponsibility. The life history of IvanVasilyevich Babushkin, the ten years’ Social-Democraticactivity of this worker-Iskrist is a striking refutation of thisliberal lie. I. V. Babushkin is one of those working-classmilitants who 10 years before the revolution began to createthe workers’ Social-Democratic Party. Had it not been for thetireless, heroically persistent work of such militants among theproletarian masses the R.S.D.L.P. could not have existed tenmonths let alone ten years. Thanks only to the activities ofsuch militants, thanks only to their support, the R.S.D.L.P.developed by 1905 into a Party which became inseparablyfused with the proletariat in the great days of October andDecember, which maintained this connection in the personof the workers’ deputies not only in the Second, but evenin the Third, Black-Hundred DumaThe liberals (Cadets) want to make a national hero outof the late S. A. Muromtsev who was the Chairman of theFirst Duma. We, the Social-Democrats, must not let the opportunityslip of expressing our contempt and hatred of thetsarist government, which persecuted even such moderateand inoffensive officials as Muromtsev. Muromtsev was only