A full examination of Lars Lih’s argument is well beyond the scope of an initial reaction such as mine today. I will note a few points to indicate my thinking.

Lars concludes, “Our final question is about the Russian revolution and its fate.” Here at least he concedes that the revolution that began in October 1917 did not end there. And neither I would add, did Lenin’s thinking about it, nor the thinking of other Bolsheviks who continued to support the revolution and Soviet power, taking the opposite path from Kautsky. Not for nothing is Lenin’s well known 1918 polemic NOT titled “Proletarian Revolution and the Architect Kautsky.”

Lars then argues, “It was best put by Kautsky himself, to whom we should give the last word.”
Really? Was Kautsky’s analysis truly the last word? Or is it rather the word that Lars agrees with, as opposed to later words offered by Lenin and others? Let’s examine Lars’ thesis a bit further:
“Kautsky recapitulated his longtime argument that ‘the new revolutionary regime will be well protected against a counterrevolution, [because] the peasants will join it and remain faithful to it.’ Note as Lars does that Kautsky wrote this in March 1917 so the regime he is discussing was that of the Provisional Government, not the one established by the October Revolution.

Lares continues regarding Kautsky: “He then wondered how long the worker-peasant alliance would remain in force, since ‘the peasantry’s dependence on the revolution does not mean that they will support a further revolutionary advance of the proletariat.'”

A an absolutely essential question to be sure and one that preoccupied Lenin and the Bolsheviks until the end of Lenin’s life (and then following that, by those who tried to continue Lenin’s course).
Lars then elaborates the question a bit further and, in my view muddles it in a way that Lenin did not:
“Therefore, [now citing Kautsky’s words again] ‘the peasant is the ‘x’, the unknown variable, in the equation of the Russian Revolution. We are still unable to insert a figure for it. And yet we know that this figure is the crucial one, the decisive one. For this reason, the Russian Revolution can and will spring tremendous surprises on us.'”

Was the peasant the unknown variable? Was the peasantry an undifferentiated economic class or was it made up of different elements with political interests that were not always identical? I would argue the political course followed by the Bolsheviks — in the real situation that unfolded that included Civil War and foreign intervention — aimed at sustaining and strengthening the worker-peasant alliance, was the decisive variable. I am not quibbling about semantics here. The key difference is both the nature of the peasantry and the role of a revolutionary party in this process.
As anyone who has read Lenin’s final writings knows, this issue preoccupied him until the very end of his life and he was not hesitant to express his concerns that the party was making important errors that required sharp correction. (I recommend this book to others but Lenin’s writings are all available separate from this collection.)

https://www.amazon.com/Lenins-Final-Fight…/dp/1604880279

Lars appears to discount Lenin’s post-1917 writings (or most of them) for the purposes of this discussion. I find that decision inexplicable. Especially because Lars devotes quite some attention to the issue of the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks advocacy of it and then its dissolution. and he concludes with this:

“Whether for good reasons or bad, Lenin and the Bolsheviks defined themselves after October as the destroyers of political freedom in Russia.”

Really? If we are going to look at what happened “after October” should Lenin not be given at least equal time with Kautsky in any summation or “final word”? Is there no place in Lars’ analysis for Lenin’s arguments in his 1918 polemic with Kautsky mentioned above, including an entire chapter titled, “The Constituent Assembly And The Soviet Republic”?

https://www.marxists.org/…/1918/prrk/soviet_republic.htm

Early in this second article Lars refers to, “two, deep-rooted misconceptions about 1917: first, that a clash between two types of democracy—parliamentary vs soviet—as found in the pages of State and Revolution, had anything to do with the October victory or the politics of the revolutionary year. (State and Revolution was drafted in 1917 but only published in 1918 and it is irrelevant to the events of the previous year.)”

Lenin, who even Lars must admit has at least an equal claim to being the architect of the October Revolution as Kautsky, did not see it quite that way. Read Lenin’s postscript:

“This pamphlet was written in August and September 1917. I had already drawn up the plan for the next, the seventh chapter, ‘The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’. Apart from the title, however, I had no time to write a single line of the chapter; I was ‘interrupted’ by a political crisis–the eve of the October revolution of 1917. Such an ‘interruption’ can only be welcomed; but the writing of the second part of this pamphlet (‘The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’) will probably have to be put off for a long time. It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it.
The Author
Petrograd
November 30, 1917
——————-
Having gone further through “the experience of revolution” Lenin DID write more on this subject, even if he did not return to the precise title of his unwritten chapter.

By 1918 Lenin was again able to address these issues based on the actual experience of the first successful proletarian revolution, which led him to his polemic with Kautsky.

The attempt to dispense with both this polemic and “State and Revolution,” in a discussion about Kautsky’s place in the history of Bolshevik thinking and analysis of October 1917, is quite mistaken it seems to me.

My “initial reaction” has already gone on far longer than I intended so I will simply stop here and allow Lenin to have the last word:

“Kautsky took an indirect part in this controversy in 1905, when, in reply to an inquiry by the then Menshevik Plekhanov, he expressed an opinion that was essentially against Plekhanov, which provoked particular ridicule in the Bolshevik press at the time. But now Kautsky does not say a single word about the controversies of that time (for fear of being exposed by his own statements!), and thereby makes it utterly impossible for the German reader to understand the essence of the matter. Mr. Kautsky could not tell the German workers in 1918 that in 1905 he had been in favour of an alliance of the workers with the peasants and not with the liberal bourgeoisie, and on what conditions he had advocated this alliance, and what programme he had outlined for it….

“The question which Kautsky has so tangled up was fully explained by the Bolsheviks as far back as 1905. Yes, our revolution is a bourgeois revolution as long as we march with the peasants as a whole. This has been as clear as clear can be to us; we have said it hundreds and thousands of times since 1905, and we have never attempted to skip this necessary stage of the historical process or abolish it by decrees. Kautsky’s efforts to “expose” us on this point merely expose his own confusion of mind and his fear to recall what he wrote in 1905, when he was not yet a renegade.
Beginning with April 1917, however, long before the October Revolution, that is, long before we assumed power, we publicly declared and explained to the people: the revolution cannot now stop at this stage, for the country has marched forward, capitalism has advanced, ruin has reached fantastic dimensions, which (whether one likes it or not) will demand steps forward, to socialism. For there is no other way of advancing, of saving the war-weary country and of alleviating the sufferings of the working and exploited people.

Things have turned out just as we said they would. The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning. First, with the “whole” of the peasants against the monarchy, against the landowners, against medievalism (and to that extent the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise an artificial Chinese Wall between the first and second, to separate them by anything else than the degree of preparedness of the proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor peasants, means to distort Marxism dreadfully, to vulgarise it, to substitute liberalism in its place. It means smuggling in a reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the socialist proletariat by means of quasi-scientific references to the progressive character of the bourgeoisie in comparison with medievalism.

“Incidentally, the Soviets represent an immensely higher form and type of democracy just because, by uniting and drawing the mass of workers and peasants into political life, they serve as a most sensitive barometer, the one closest to the ‘people’ (in the sense in which Marx, in 1871, spoke of a real people’s revolution[35]), of the growth and development of the political, class maturity of the people. The Soviet Constitution was not drawn up according to some ‘plan’; it was not drawn up in a study, and was not foisted on the working people by bourgeois lawyers. No, this Constitution grew up in the course of the development of the class struggle in proportion as class antagonisms matured. The very facts which Kautsky himself has to admit prove this.

“At first, the Soviets embraced the peasants as a whole. It was owing to the immaturity, the backwardness, the ignorance of the poor peasants that the leadership passed into the hands of the kulaks, the rich, the capitalists and the petty-bourgeois intellectuals. That was the period of the domination of the petty bourgeoisie, of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries (only fools or renegades like Kautsky can regard either of these as socialists). The petty bourgeoisie inevitably and unavoidably vacillated between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (Kerensky, Kornilov, Savinkov) and the dictatorship of the proletariat; for owing to the basic features of its economic position, the petty bourgeoisie is incapable of doing anything independently. Kautsky, by the way, completely renounces Marxism by confining himself in his analysis of the Russian revolution to the legal and formal concept of ‘democracy’, which serves the bourgeoisie as a screen to conceal their domination and as a means of deceiving the people, and by forgetting that in practice ‘democracy’ sometimes stands for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, sometimes for the impotent reformism of the petty bourgeoisie who submit to that dictatorship, and so on.”

From the chapter in the 1918 polemic titled, “Subservience To The Bourgeoisie In The Guise of ‘Economic Analysis'”