22 January 1919

Zinoviev’s speech at the opening of the monument in the Shlissel’burg to its prisoners

…the working population of Petrograd, that it has fallen to us to erect a monument to people who will be the pride of world history. We are gathered here today in small numbers, but we deeply believe that the tens of millions of workers and peasants across Russia feel the same respect for the fighters of Shlisselburg and likewise reverently bow their heads today before the monument erected to these heroes, just as we, gathered here, do.

…a party, composed of a small handful of intellectuals, representatives of the conscious workers and intelligentsia as a whole, when this party was broken, when the tsarist autocracy strangled it… [Narodnoaia Volia]

…during this time, a handful of daredevils continued to go against the current…

…it’s easy to be a revolutionary these days…

…here people were tortured, like Ippolyt Myshkin, Stepan Balmashov, Ivan Kalyayev, and many others.

Comrades, the majority of those held belonged to the new generation of revolutionaries, I think I speak on their behalf when I say that we steeled ourselves precisely by remembering what our predecessors, the glorious Shlisselburgers, did. Whether in hard labor, in prison, or in emigration, the last 10-15 years fighting for those unreachable examples, the great ideal were the comrades of Shlisselburg. It was all the more painful, comrades, to now disagree with some of the venerable old members of the People’s Will party. It was sadder to see how some of them did not understand certain tasks set by the revolution and how they sometimes looked with incomprehension, sometimes with hostility at our endeavors…

…To cross swords and in one way or another fight against their direction, as they fought against ours. But deep in the soul of each of us lives the greatest respect and reverence… for the struggle of those who entered the arena of battle 20 years before us…

They began the struggle at a time when only a handful of people understood them, when Tsarist dogs crucified Chernyshevsky in the streets and squares of Petrograd, when they performed a civil death penalty, to mock the best of the Shlisselburg predecessors, and as one eyewitness from a group of even workers… insult was hurled at Chernyshevsky, at the man who is now the pride of all humanity…

The first senior generation of those comrades who came here in the mid and late 1880s and some of whom managed to escape after the first revolution of 1905. And another, younger generation, made up of workers, sailors, from peasants who came here after the suppression of the first revolution of 1905. Some of whom also spent ten years. It goes without saying that we pay equal homage to both these generations: before the one as before the other we reverently take off our hat. The word Shlisselburger meaning in a word hero and martyr… Here many people died, not belonging to our party, to the party that is partly now fighting against us. But these people are as dear to us as the people of our own party. And we have the audacity to think that we, workers, sailors, Red Army soldiers, and peasants, standing under the banners of Soviet power and the Communist Party, carry forward the banner that *** from the hands of such people as Stepan *** and Kalyayev. We believe that the man at the head of Soviet Russia, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, carries the banner that was wrested from the hands of his brother A. I. Ulyanov, executed within these walls. The best bequests bequeathed to us by the People’s Will party – the party of heroes. These best bequests are carried by workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors. And the people who died here could not dream of greater happiness than that their ideas, which were the heritage of dozens, hundreds, and thousands of people, became the heritage of millions, tens of millions, and hundreds of millions.

Eternal memory to the heroes who perished in Shlisselburg, and eternal disgrace, eternal curse to the executioners who tortured them. However bitter the moment, however hard for the working class and peasants of Russia, this monument serves as a pledge that there is no turning back and never will be. The seed sown by the Shlisselburgers has sprouted; it has given rise to individual shoots.