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

488V. I. LENINpatently lying. We got some very strong confirmation of thisjust today. It was a report from the Don area (a night telegram)about a congress held by a section of the Cossacks inVoronezh, and a congress of 20 Cossack regiments and 5batteries in Kamenskaya village. The Cossacks at the frontconvened their own congress because they saw that Kaledinwas rallying officers, cadets and landowners’ sons who donot want the Soviets to take power in Russia and want theDon to have self-determination. A party is being formedthere around Kaledin, who styles himself the great chieftain.And so the congress of the front-line Cossacks had tobe dispersed. 169 The Cossacks countered by, firstly, unitingwith the Voronezh Congress, and secondly, by declaring waron Kaledin, thirdly, arresting the Cossack atamans, andfourthly, occupying all the main stations.Let the Ryabushinskys, who sent millions abroad anddonated millions over here to pay the saboteurs for obstructingSoviet power, let the Ryabushinskys, and the capitalistsof France and Britain, together with the king of Rumania,let them all bewail their fate; their last stake has beenlost even in the Don area, where there were the greatestnumber of rich peasants who lived on hired labour, whoexploited the labour of others, and carried on a constantstruggle against the migrant labourers driven to those partsfrom afar by privation; even there, where exploiter-peasantswere most numerous, the people resent this organisation ofcadets, officers and property-owners who have decided tooppose Soviet power. Even there we find the same divisionwhich everyone ignores and for which the blame is being puton us. “The Bolsheviks have declared civil war.” Is it po~siblethat we have invented Kaledin; is it possible that theBolsheviks have invented Ryabushinsky? We all know thatthey were the mainstay of the tsarist regime, and are nowmerely lying in wait, biding their time to turn the RussianRepublic into the kind of bourgeois republic that you havein most countries where, with all the liberty and representation,the working people are oppressed just as much as,if not more than, in any monarchy. When we hear it saidthat the Bolsheviks are kindling a fratricidal war, a civilwar, when curses are heaped on the Bolsheviks for havingbrought about the criminal fratricidal civil war, we reply: