When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in the first days of November 1917, socialists everywhere greeted the news with delight. But not Karl Kautsky, the German Social Democrat then widely known as the “Pope of Marxism”. Within a week of the Bolshevik “revolution” Kautsky was already writing up his criticisms of the new regime. By the following summer, he published these as a book, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which was a blistering attack on the new Soviet state. Lenin, for whom Kautsky was a mentor, was furious. He took a break from running that Soviet state to writing a book-length rebuttal to Kautsky in which he famously described his former teacher as a “renegade”. This book is Kautsky’s followup to the earlier one — but it is not in any way a direct answer to Lenin. This book got Trotsky to hastily write a reply, also called Terrorism and Communism, which the Red Army commander drafted while leading troops into battle from his armoured train.

I was frankly disappointed with this book. It is not Kautsky at his best. In some senses, it is Kautsky at his worst — pedantic, repetitive, and wandering. The first half of the book doesn’t even mention Russia and the Bolsheviks. Instead it is a ponderous history of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Kautsky is trying to draw out some general rules of revolution, but without much success. The remaining bits of the book reiterate arguments he made about the Bolsheviks in his earlier book. I imagine that Trotsky felt the need to reply not because of the power of Kautsky’s arguments, but because of who Kautsky was — the pre-eminent Marxist theoretician of his time.

One of the biggest surprises of this book is how amorphous Kautsky’s views really were at this time (1919). After criticising the Bolsheviks for a long list of sins, he concludes: “Whatever one may think of the Bolshevik methods, the fact that a proletarian government in a great state has not only come into power, but been able to maintain itself for nearly two years under the most difficult conditions conceivable, naturally increases the feeling of power among the proletariat of all countries. For the world-revolution therefore, in this respect, the Bolsheviks have rendered an enormous service …”

Strange words coming from a man who a year or two later would be comparing the Bolsheviks to Mussolini’s Fascists. Kautsky eventually convinced the Social Democratic and Labour parties in Euroope into supporting armed insurrections against the Soviet government — which he was still calling “proletarian” at this stage.

This edition fo the book is ill-served by its original translation. W.H. Kerridge, the translator, was a church organist and pianist for an opera company. He was also, apparently, a linguist, though it’s not clear if he had any background on the Left. It would be a good thing if someone would come along and do a new, better translation from the original German.