Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Lessons of the Revolution (1918).djvu/25



On April 20–21 it burst. The movement broke forth elementally, spontaneously. It was so rigorously directed against the government that one regiment fully armed went straight to the Marinsky Palace to arrest the Ministers. It was universally apparent that the government could no longer hold out. The Soviets at that time could (and ought to) have taken the power into their hands without the least resistance from any quarter. Instead, the Essers and Mensheviks have supported the toppling capitalist government, have ever more entangled themselves in their «alliance policy», have taken ever more fatal steps leading to the ruin of the revolution.

The revolution teaches all classes with a rapidity and thoroughness unknown in times of peace and everyday life. The capitalists, who are better organized, more expert in the business of class struggle and class politics, learned the lesson more readily than the other classes. Seeing that the position of the government was untenable, they resorted to a method which since 1848 has been for decades practised by the capitalists in order to befog, divide and finally to overpower the working class. This method is the so-called «coalition ministry», composed of bourgeois and of renegades from the Socialist camp.

In those countries where freedom and democracy, have existed side by side with the revolutionary movement of the workers—for example in