An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe by Leon Trotsky

Author:Leon Trotsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141963402
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

17. Lenin Wounded

On August 30, 1918 a Social Revolutionary, Dora Kaplan, attempted to assassinate Lenin. Trotsky rushed back to Moscow from the front line on the Volga and gave this speech to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets.

Comrades, your brotherly greetings I explain by the fact that in these difficult days and hours we all feel deeply as brothers a need of closer union with each other and with our Soviet organizations, and the need of closing our ranks more tightly under our Communist banner. In these days and hours so filled with anxiety, when our standard-bearer, and with perfect right it can be said the international standard-bearer of the proletariat, lies on his sickbed fighting with the terrible shadow of death, we are drawn closer to one another than in the hours of victory …

The news of the attack on Comrade Lenin reached me and many other comrades in Svyazhsk on the Kazan front. We suffered blows there, blows from the right, blows from the left, blows between the eyes. But this new blow was a blow in the back from ambush deep in the rear. This treacherous blow has opened a new front, which for the present moment is the most distressing, the most alarming for us: the front where Vladimir Ilyich’s life struggles with death. Whatever defeats may await us on this or that front – and I am like you firmly convinced of our imminent victory – no single partial defeat could be so onerous, so tragic, for the working class of Russia and the whole world, as would be a fatal issue of the fight at the front that runs through the breast of our leader.

One need only reflect in order to understand the concentrated hate that this figure has called forth and will continue to call forth from all the enemies of the working class. For nature produced a masterpiece when it created in a single individual an embodiment of the revolutionary thought and the unbending energy of the working class. This figure is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The gallery of proletarian leaders, revolutionary fighters, is very rich and varied, and like many other comrades who have been in revolutionary work for three decades, I have had the opportunity to meet in different lands many varieties of the proletarian type of leader – the revolutionary representatives of the working class. But only in the person of Comrade Lenin have we a figure created for our epoch of blood and iron.

Behind us lies the epoch of so-called peaceful development of bourgeois society, during which contradictions accumulated gradually, while Europe lived through the period of so-called armed peace, and blood flowed almost in the colonies alone where predatory capital tortured the more backward peoples. Europe enjoyed her so-called peace of capitalist militarism. In this epoch were formed and fashioned the outstanding leaders of the European working-class movement. Among them we saw such a brilliant figure as that of August Bebel. But he reflected the epoch of the gradual and slow development of the working class.

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