V. I.

Lenin

Speech Delivered in the Name of the R.S.D.L.P. at The Funeral of Paul and Laura Lafargue November 20 (December 3), 1911

Comrades, on behalf of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour
Party I wish to convey our feelings of deep sorrow on the death of Paul
and Laura Lafargue. Even in the period of preparation for the Russian
revolution, the class-conscious workers and all Social-Democrats of Russia
learned profound respect for Lafargue as one of the most gifted and
profound disseminators of the ideas of Marxism, ideas that were so
brilliantly confirmed by the class struggle during the Russian revolution
and counter-revolution. United under the banner of those ideas, the
vanguard of the Russian workers waged an organised mass struggle and dealt
a blow to absolutism, it upheld, as it continues to uphold, the cause of
socialism, the cause of the revolution, the cause of democracy despite the
treachery, vacillation, and irresolution of the liberal bourgeoisie.

For the Russian worker Social-Democrats Lafargue symbolised two eras:
the era in which the revolutionary youth of France, animated by republican
ideas, marched shoulder to shoulder with the French workers to attack the
Empire, and the era in which the French proletariat, under Marxist
leadership, waged a sustained class struggle against the en tire bourgeois
system and prepared for the final battle against the bourgeoisie to win
socialism.

We, Russian Social-Democrats, who have experienced all the oppression
of an absolutism impregnated with Asiatic barbarity, and who have had the
good fortune, through the writings of Lafargue and his friends, directly to
draw on the revolutionary experience and revolutionary thought of the European workers—we can now see with particular clarity how rapidly
we are nearing the triumph of the cause to which Lafargue devoted all his
life. The Russian revolution ushered in an era of democratic revolutions
throughout Asia, and 800 million people are now joining in the democratic
movement of the whole of the civilised world. In Europe, too, there are
increasing signs that the era of so-called peaceful bourgeois
parliamentarianism is drawing to an end, to give place to an era of
revolutionary battles by a proletariat that has been organised and educated
in the spirit of Marxist ideas, and that will overthrow bourgeois rule and
establish a communist system.

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