Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 26 - From Marx to Mao

36V. I. LENINthe bourgeoisie, has not yet been tried; or, to be more precise,such an alliance has been tried on one front only, forfive days only, from August 26 to August 31, the period ofthe Kornilov revolt, and this alliance at that time scoreda victory over the counter-revolution with an ease neveryet achieved in any revolution; it was such a crushingsuppression of the bourgeois, landowners’, capitalist,Allied-imperialist and Cadet counter-revolution, that thecivil war from that side ceased to exist, was a mere nothingfrom the very outset, collapsed before any “battle” had takenplace.In the face of this historic fact the entire bourgeois pressand all its chorus (the Plekhanovs, Potresovs, Breshko-Breshkovskayas, etc.) are shouting with all their mightthat an alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviksand Socialist-Revolutionaries “threatens” the horrors ofcivil war!This would be funny, if it were not so sad. It is sad indeedthat such an open, self-evident, glaring absurdity, such aflouting of the facts of the whole history of our revolution,can still find listeners.... This only proves that the selfishbourgeois lie is still widespread (and this cannot be avoidedas long as the press is monopolised by the bourgeoisie), alie that shouts down and drowns the most undoubted,palpably obvious lessons of the revolution.If there is an absolutely undisputed lesson of the revolution,one fully proved by facts, it is that only an allianceof the Bolsheviks with the Socialist-Revolutionaries andMensheviks, only an immediate transfer of all power to theSoviets would make civil war in Russia impossible, for acivil war begun by the bourgeoisie against such an alliance,against the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’Deputies, is inconceivable; such a “war” would not lasteven until the first battle; the bourgeoisie, for the secondtime since the Kornilov revolt, would not be able to moveeven the Savage Division, or the former number of Cossackunits against the Soviet Government!The peaceful development of any revolution is, generallyspeaking, extremely rare and difficult, because revolutionis the maximum exacerbation of the sharpest classcontradictions; but in a peasant country, at a time when