In recent months, Jacobin has seen an exchange of views on the theme of Kautsky vs. Lenin. Many good points were made, but on the subject of the October Revolution, we are presented with a stark choice: either Kautsky is right and Lenin is wrong, or Lenin is right and Kautsky wrong. But this is a strange and unhelpful debate, because — as Bolsheviks of Lenin’s generation knew very well and current research reaffirms — Kautsky and Lenin were on the same page over a whole range of fundamental issues. Indeed, Kautsky served as mentor to the Bolsheviks precisely on the issues that defined them and divided them from their Menshevik rivals.

Karl Kautsky even deserves to be called the architect of the Bolshevik victory in October. Of course, I am not saying that Kautsky was necessarily the first to come up with these ideas or that the Bolsheviks did not arrive at them independently. But Kautsky gave authoritative endorsement to the key tactical ideas of Bolshevism, giving clarity and confidence to the Russians with an impact that is hard to overestimate. These ideas were set forth in specific writings much lauded by the Bolsheviks and used by them in polemics against the Menshevik “opportunists.” The same ideas led to their party’s victory in October and the ensuing civil war. Lenin and the Bolsheviks never rejected these ideas nor the writings in which Kautsky expressed them.

Getting the Kautsky-Bolshevik relation right is not just an academic exercise, a “fun fact” about the Marxists of yore. As the current debate shows, the Russian and the Bolshevik victory are crucially distorted if we go along with the folklore that the Bolsheviks succeeded because they relied on “insurrection” rather than “electoralism” — folklore perpetuated by friends of October as well as by its foes. Nor did the revolution in 1917 have anything to do with Lenin’s argument that “soviet democracy” was a higher type than “parliamentary democracy,” as incarnated in the Constituent Assembly that was shut down in January 1918 by the Soviet government (at the time, a coalition of Bolsheviks and Left SRs). During 1917, “soviet power” was not understood in these terms either by the Bolsheviks or the mass soviet constituency.