Blood has flowed in the streets of Petrograd. A tragic chapter has been added to the Russian Revolution. Who is to blame? “The Bolsheviks,” says the man in the street, repeating what his newspapers tell him. The sum total of these tragic happenings is exhausted, as far as the bourgeoisie and the time-serving politicians are concerned, in the words: Arrest the ringleaders and disarm the masses. And the object of this action is to establish “revolutionary order”. The Social-Revolutionists and the Mensheviks, in arresting and disarming the Bolsheviks, are prepared to establish “order”. There is only one question: What kind of order, and for whom?

There have never been so many pacifists as at this moment, when people are slaying each other on all the great highways of our planet. Each epoch has not only its own technology and political forms, but also its own style of hypocrisy. Time was when the nations destroyed each other for the glory of Cist’s teachings and the love of one’s neighbour. Now Cist is invoked only by backward governments. The advanced nations cut each other’s toats under the banners of pacifism a league of nations and a durable peace. Kerensky and Tseretelli shout for an offensive, in the name of an “early conclusion of peace.”

"We are for unity with them as long as they fight against the counter-revolution. We are against unity with them as long as they ally themselves with the counter-revolution."

"The point is that the petty-bourgeois democrats, who take their cue from the Russian and the Allied imperialists, need to do away with the internationalist socialists once and for all."

That the new coalition government is precisely this sort of alliance between the capitalists and the Narodnik and Menshevik leaders is far from obvious to all. Perhaps it is not obvious even to the Ministers belonging to these parties. Yet it is a fact.

Lenin's Speeches at the first All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, June 16 to July 7 (June 3 to 24), 1917.