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

431PEOPLE FROM ANOTHER WORLD“Friends, I have lost a day,” says an old Latin tag. Onecannot help but recall it when one remembers how the fifthof January was lost.After real, lively, Soviet work among workers and peasantsengaged on real tasks, clearing the forest and uprootingthe stumps of landowner and capitalist exploitation, we weresuddenly transported to “another world”, to arrivals fromanother world, from the camp of the bourgeoisie with itswilling or unwilling, conscious or unconscious champions,with its hangers-on, servants and advocates. Out of the worldin which the working people and their Soviet organisationwere conducting the struggle against the exploiters we weretransported to the world of saccharine phrases, of slick,empty declamations, of promises and more promises based,as before, on conciliation with the capitalists.It is as though history had accidentally, or by mistake,turned its clock back, and January 1918 for a single daybecame May or June 1917!It was terrible! To be transported from the world of livingpeople into the company of corpses, to breathe the odourof the dead, to hear those mummies with their empty“social” Louis Blanc 159 phrases, to hear Chernov and Tsereteli,was simply intolerable.Comrade Skvortsov was right when he rapped out to theRight Socialist-Revolutionaries these two or three briefphrases, simple, calm and at the same time ruthlessly cutting:“Between us everything is over. We are carrying theOctober Revolution against the bourgeoisie to its culmination.We and you are on different sides of the barricades.”