revolt. And this alliance made it possible to conquer the counter-revolutionary forces with supreme ease, unexampled in any other revolution. It inflicted such a defeat on the counter-revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie, the landed proprietors, the capitalists, the Allied imperialists and the Cadets, that the civil war (which was initiated by the bourgeoisie) was held up from the start, crushed at birth, annihilated without a shot being fired. In spite of this historical fact the whole bourgeois Press with its auxiliaries (the Plekhanovs, Potressovs, Brechko-Brechkovskaias, &c.) continues to declare that a union of the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries would threaten Russia with the horrors of civil war!
It would be laughable if it were not so sad. It is pitiful that anything so obviously absurd, so appalling, and which evinces such a contempt for the facts, such a misreading of the whole history of our revolution should still be believed. It only goes to prove how widely spread are the bourgeois lies (inevitable since the bourgeoisie monopolise the Press) which smother the most indisputable and tangible lessons of the revolution.
If the revolution teaches anything, incontestably and definitely proved by facts, it is that only the alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, only the immediate handing over of all power to the Soviets, can prevent civil war. The bourgeoisie could not even dream of launching this alliance into civil war against the Soviets of elected workers, soldiers and peasants, for this war would not even get so far as one battle. After Kornilov's adventure the bourgeoisie would not even find a "barbarian division."
The peaceful development of a revolution such as this is on the whole an extremely unusual and difficult process. For revolution is the culminating point in the antagonism of the classes. But in a fundamentally agrarian country where the alliance of the proletariat and the peasants can give peace to the masses exhausted by an unjust and criminal war, and all the land to the peasants—given such an exceptional moment historically, the peaceful growth of the revolution would be both possible and probable if all power were given over to the Soviets. The struggle of the parties for power could develop peacefully in the heart of the Soviets on condition that the latter cease to distort democratic principles, as, for example, granting the soldiers one representative
