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

456V. I. LENINWe find ourselves in immeasurably more favourablecircumstances because the Russian soldiers, workers andpeasants were able to create the Soviet Government, anapparatus which informed the whole world of their methodsof struggle. It is this that puts the Russian workers andpeasants in a position that differs from the power of theParis proletariat. They had no apparatus, the country didnot understand them; we were immediately able to relyon Soviet power, and that is why we never doubted thatSoviet power enjoys the sympathy and the warmest and mostdevoted support of the overwhelming majority of the people,and that therefore Soviet power is invincible.Those who were sceptical of Soviet power and frequently,either consciously or unconsciously, sold and betrayed itfor compromise with the capitalists and the imperialists,raised a deafening clamour about the power of the proletariatalone not being able to be maintained in Russia. As ifany Bolsheviks or their supporters forgot even for a momentthat in Russia only that power could last for any length oftime that would be able to unite the working class and themajority of the peasants, all the working and exploitedclasses, in a single, inseparably interconnected force fightingagainst the landowners and the bourgeoisie.We never doubted that only the alliance of the workersand the poor peasants, the semi-proletarians, mentioned inour Party Programme, can, in Russia, embrace the majorityof the population and ensure firm support for the government.And after October 25 we were immediately able, inthe course of several weeks, to overcome all difficulties andestablish a government on the basis of this firm alliance.Yes, comrades! When the Socialist-Revolutionary Party,in its old form—when the peasants did not yet understandwho in this party were real advocates of socialism—putforward the slogan of equalitarian land tenure, withoutcaring who was to put it through, whether it was to beeffected in alliance with the bourgeoisie or not, we brandedthat as a fraud. And this section, which has, now realised thatthe people are not with it and that it is a bubbler claimedthat it could carry out equalitarian land tenure in alliancewith the bourgeoisie. In this lay the basic fraud. And whenthe Russian revolution presented an example of collabora-