Lih does not understand the significance of this unprecedented and cardinal feature — but Lenin bends over backwards to analyse and bring out its significance in the April Theses. Furthermore, prior to 1917, the Bolsheviks expected they would dominate the (one) Provisional Government, making it a Revolutionary Provisional Government. But — lo and behold — this Provisional Government is dominated by the Kadets, a, in the Bolshevik view, *cowardly* liberal bourgeois party that could not be expected to lead anything — letting alone leading (formally) the bourgeois-democratic revolution!.

But, this is what, incredibly, has happened. Lih does not understand how this astounding turn of events has thrown the Bolsheviks for another loop! Lenin writes in an excised passage: “Let us not make the mistake of those who—like certain “O.C.” supporters or “Mensheviks” who are oscillating between the Gvozdev-Potresov line and internationalism and who only too often slip into petty-bourgeois pacifism—are now ready to extol “agreement” [soglashenie] between the workers’ party and the Kadets, “support” of the latter by the former, and so on.

In conformity with the old (and by no means Marxist) doctrine that they have learned by rote.” Here, Lenin is also implicating those Old Bolsheviks who are seeking a rapprochement with the Mensheviks and, therefore, a rapprochement with their policy of critical support to the counter-revolutionary Provisional Government. Lih does not understand this.