This is a superb book – well-written and compelling. It tells the little-known (or little-remembered) story of the relationship between the man known as the ‘Pope of Marxism’ and the Russian revolutionaries. Karl Kautsky was a mentor to more than one generation of those Russian socialists, and one of his best-known disciples was Lenin. For that reason, Kautsky’s decision in early 1918 to break ranks with the rest of the socialist movement and write a stinging critique of the Bolshevik coup d’etat was all the more remarkable. My only gripe about the book comes at the very end. Donald writes about a memorandum Kautsky authored, later published as a book in 1925, in which he “argued … that a popular uprising against the Communist dictatorship was necessary”. She neglects to mention that the memorandum was drafted in response to the Georgian uprising of August 1924 — it was not a theoretical proposition but an actual uprising that had taken place. The great pity about this book is that it seems nearly impossible to get hold of a copy. Yet another reason why I love the London Library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a superb book – well-written and compelling. It tells the little-known (or little-remembered) story of the relationship between the man known as the ‘Pope of Marxism’ and the Russian revolutionaries. Karl Kautsky was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2695,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2694"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2696,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2694\/revisions\/2696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}