V. I. Lenin

"Friends, I have lost a day," says an old Latin tag. One cannot
help but recall it when one remembers how the fifth of January
was lost.

After real, lively, Soviet work among workers and peasants
engaged on real tasks , clearing the forest and uprooting the stumps of landowner and capitalist exploitation,
we were suddenly transported to "another world", to arrivals
from another world, from the camp of the bourgeoisie with its
willing or unwilling, conscious or unconscious champions, with
its hangers-on, servants and advocates. Out of the world in
which the working people and their Soviet organisation were
conducting the struggle against the exploiters we were transported 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 day became May or
June 1917!

It was terrible! To be transported from the world of living
people into the company of corpses, to breathe the odour of the
dead, to hear those mummies with their empty "social" Louis Blanc phrases, to hear Chernov and Tsereteli, was simply
intolerable.

Comrade Skvortsov was right when he rapped out to the Right
Socialist-Revolutionaries these two or three brief phrases,
simple, calm and at the same time ruthlessly cutting: "Between
us everything is over. We are carrying the October Revolution
against the bourgeoisie to its culmination. We and you are on
different sides of the barricades."

In reply to that came a torrent of over-smooth, empty phrases
from Chernov and Tsereteli that carefully avoided only (only!)
one question—that of Soviet power, of the October
Revolution. "Let there be no civil war, let there be no
sabotage," said Chernov, invoking the revolution in the name of
the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries. And the latter who for six
months, from June 1917 to January 1918, had been sleeping like
corpses in their coffins, stood up and clapped furiously and
persistently. It is really so easy and so pleasant to settle the
problems of the revolution by an incantation. "Let there be no
civil war, let there be no sabotage, let everybody recognise the
Constituent Assembly." In what way does that differ, in essence,
from the invocation: "Let the workers and capitalists make
peace"? Not in any way. The Kaledins and Ryabushinskys together
with their imperialist friends in all countries will not
disappear or change their policy because of the invocations of
the mealy-mouthed Chernov or because of Tsereteli's boring
precepts that seem to have been taken from a misunderstood,
poorly read and misinterpreted book.

Either conquer the Kaledins and Ryabushinskys or give up the
revolution. Either victory over the exploiters in the civil war,
or the collapse of the revolution. Such has been the issue in
all revolutions, in the English revolution in the seventeenth century, in the French in the eighteenth century and
in the German in the nineteenth century. How could it be thought
that the Russian revolution in the twentieth century would
not face that issue? How can wolves become lambs?

Tsereteli and Chernov do not show a grain of an idea, not the
slightest desire to accept the fact of the class struggle that
has become civil war, not by chance, not suddenly, not because
of somebody's caprice or ill will, but inevitably, in the long
process of revolutionary development.

It was a hard, boring and irksome day in the elegant rooms of
the Taurida Palace, whose very aspect differs from that of
Smolny approximately in the same way as elegant, but moribund
bourgeois parliamentarism differs from the plain, proletarian
Soviet apparatus that is in many ways still disorderly and
imperfect but is living and vital. There, in that old world of
bourgeois parliamentarism, the leaders of hostile classes and
hostile groups of the bourgeoisie did their fencing.
Here, in the new world of the proletarian and peasant, socialist
state, the oppressed classes are making clumsy, inefficient. . . . [manuscript breaks off at this point— Editor ]