The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (pamphlet)

The work criticizes the Bolsheviks, arguing they eschewed democracy in favor of military force when establishing the Russian SFSR.

[1] In this work, Kautsky argues that "the antagonism of the two Socialist movements [i.e., Bolshevism and non-Bolshevism] is not based on small personal jealousies: it is the clashing of two fundamentally distinct methods, that of democracy and that of dictatorship.

[6] Kautsky subsequently responded to Lenin's counterattack with a second pamphlet, Terrorism and Communism (1919), in which he argued that "the Bolsheviks ... survived not as socialists but as architects of a bourgeois regime".

[7] Leon Trotsky then replied to Kautsky with a work also titled Terrorism and Communism (1920).

[4][8] The historian Fernando Claudín later characterized The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Kautsky's Terrorism and Communism as "the two basic texts of the Kautskyan assault on Bolshevism".