It’s certainly true that Lenin put aside the algebraic “revolutionary democratic dictatorship” slogan in April 1917. But he definitely did not make a “strategic break” from the perspective it embodied. Rather, he did so because in his view the “democratic dictatorship” had already been realized – in the form of the soviet side of the dual power.

In his “Letters on Tactics” that Eric quotes from, Lenin wrote: “The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” has already become a reality (in a certain form and to a certain extent) in the Russian revolution, for this ‘formula’ envisages only a relation of classes, and not a concrete political institution implementing this relation, this co-operation. ‘The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’ – there you have the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ already accomplished in reality.”

From this perspective, Lenin was debating those in the Bolshevik Party who in April 1917 saw the slogan as belonging to the future; Lenin believed it belonged to the past.

“The person who now speaks only of a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ is behind the times; consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle.”

One can certainly debate whether Lenin was right or wrong. But to the end of his life, he maintained his belief in the correctness of the Bolsheviks’ algebraic slogan (e.g., The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky in the chapter “Subservience to the Bourgeoisie in the Guise of ‘Economic Analysis’”).