The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky

Spurred by Kautsky's 1918 pamphlet The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Lenin's pamphlet was part of an ongoing polemic between various Bolshevik leaders and the social democrat Kautsky about the role of democracy and force in the transition to socialism.

"[1] An important issue taken up by Kautsky in his pamphlet was the dispersal of the Russian Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks.

Lenin goes on to assert that Kautsky in his pamphlet resorts to lying and falsification of facts in order to try to argue his point.

Lenin continues that important, fundamental issues, especially for someone claiming to be a Marxist, received no attention from Kautsky and that he "evaded" them.

[2] Kautsky replied to Lenin's attacks in his 1934 work Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship, in which he claimed that the Bolsheviks, by managing to take control of the armed forces in Petrograd and Moscow, had laid the foundations for a new dictatorship in place of the old Czarist autocracy.