around the question of the character of our revolution, was the well-known high priest of Social-Democracy, Karl Kautsky, who first came out mildly, then as a renegade and finally as an out and out counter-revolutionary. In his earlier pamphlets he wrote relatively mildly. In the pamphlet to which Lenin replied, Kautsky still kept within the bounds of decency, but even then he objectively served in the role of the subservient ideological hack of the bourgeoisie.[1] In his works Kautsky presented the question of the character of our revolution fairly preciselу, clearly and definitely. In a bulky book bearing the title "The Proletarian Revolution and its Programme," he states directly that our revolution has the typical features of a bourgeois revolution. It could not be otherwise, he argues, because the revolution is taking place in a country, the capitalistic immaturity of which is
- ↑ In this connection it is extremely interesting to quote the opinion of the well-known Dr. Paul Scheimann expressed in a pamphlet published by the General Secretariat for Studying and Combatting Bolshevism, and which bears the very specific title of "Asianising Europe." In this pamphlet, Dr. Paul Scheimann, commenting on Kautsky's pronouncements, says literally the following: "By far the best (in German he says: "das weitaus Beste") and most convincing of what has been written about Bolshevism from the socio-political point of view, is the pamphlet by Kautsky 'The Dictatorship of the Proletariat'."
On Bolshevism he writes: "The spiritual death, the internal ossification of humanity which was peculiar to the peoples of Asia during course of thousands of years stands now like a spectre before the gates of Europe clothed in a mantle of rags of European ideas. These rags deceive those who have become blind in the cultured world. Bolshevism brings with it the Asianising of Europe." (Paul Scheimann, "Die Asiatisierung Europas, 1919, pp. 8–9.)
