The first person to criticise Old Bolshevism was Lenin!

The fact is, that in his March 1917 Pravda editorial, Kamenev suggested that there was a de-facto political alliance between the Liberal-capitalist Provisional Government and “the Democracy”
(i.e. the workers and peasants organised in Soviets).
This may have been a temporary marriage of convenience designed to overcome a common enemy, but it was an alliance nevertheless.

Kamenev’s prognosis on how long the government would last is an entirely separate issue.
His practical conclusion in March 1917 was to give it “critical support”
This was based on the assessment that the Democratic revolution was incomplete
(despite the fact that the feudal estates had yet to be officially broken up) and the government could still be pressurised from the left.

Whereas Lenin, in his first letter on tactics (April 1917) argued that
“the bourgeois-democratic, revolution in Russia is completed.”

However much Lih wants to spin it, this was a break with the Old Bolshevik strategy described in “Two tactics”, but one that was dictated by reality.
Lenin argued that the old formula of a “democratic dictatorship” of workers and peasants couldn’t work, because the peasants were voluntarily ceding power to a bourgeois government, which wanted to continue the war.

Hence the task was to split “the democracy” into its petit bourgeois and proletarian components.

He specifically criticises Kamenev;

“Is this reality covered by Comrade Kamenev’s old-Bolshevik formula, which says that “the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed”?
It is not.
The formula is obsolete. It is no good at all. It is dead. And it is no use trying to revive it.”

To fully understand Lenin’s arguments it’s important to read them in full and study them carefully.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x01.htm

It wasn’t accidental that Kamenev continued to oppose the overthrow of the provisional Government right up to October.

Trotsky was justified in writing his critique “The Lessons of October”, because he’d been called a “traitor” by a member of the ruling troika (Zinoviev) and accused of “underestimating the peasantry”.

Yet his position in October 1917 dovetailed closely with Lenin’s.

“only when the Provisional government of the liberals has exhausted itself before the face of *the democracy* of Russia will the question of the transfer of ‘vlast’ into its own hands stand before *the democracy* as a practical question.”

The term “the democracy”, was understood by Russian Marxists to mean the popular alliance of workers and peasants that would overthrow the autocracy. This was the political content of the democratic revolution.

Lenin’s “two tactics” had always proposed a revolutionary alliance between the working class and the radical peasantry to overthrow the autocracy, while recognising that they ultimately had different class interests.

But Kamenev’s editorial proposes a completely different tactic; a “revolutionary” alliance between the democracy (as currently represented in the Soviets) and the Liberal bourgeoisie!
The fact that he admits that the bourgeoisie “will comes to its senses” and “inevitably attempt to halt the the revolutionary movement” doesn’t alter the fact that what he was proposing was indeed “semi-Menshevik”.

The implication of his editorial is that the democratic revolution was incomplete.

When Lenin returned to St Petersburg in April, he argued very strongly that the democratic revolution had been already been achieved and for the *immediate practical* re-orientation of the Bolshevik party towards the perspective of winning Soviet power – a rather crucial difference.

Where Kamenev appealed to the automatic processes which would expose the the Provisional government before the Democracy, Lenin said it was *only* their political illusions in the Provisional Government which stopped the Soviets from taking power.

Kamenev’s subsequent vacillations prior to October 1917 weren’t accidental.
Having revised the meaning of the “two tactics” in February, Kamenev was thrown by the Mensheviks and SR’s opposition to the overthrow of the P.G in October.

Along with Zinoviev, he clung to the idea of a coalition with them, because he thought that this how the worker-peasant alliance could be concretised – applying “Old Bolshevism” by rote (or scabbing) as Lenin termed it.

The problem being that these parties couldn’t disentangle themseves from the Provisional Government because they’d been infected with defencism during the war.
As Trotsky rather shrewdly observed in the “Lessons of October”, the radical peasantry had acquired a “political” organisation in the form of the army, but were unable to create one of their own. Therefore they couldn’t consumate the democratic revolution, which had become intertwined with the proletarian one during the war.

Trotsky’s position was a far better guide to action than Kamenev’s.