Karl Kautsky Epitaph of Lenin (January 1924) (After Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Karl Kautsky was contacted by Panski-Solski, the Berlin correspondent of the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestia , and invited to contribute a commemorative article on Lenin. As a vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik regime, who had been memorably denounced by Lenin in the pamphlet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky , the theoretician of German social democracy was no doubt astonished to receive such a request. However, Kautsky accepted Solski’s invitation, and wrote the letter/article which is reprinted below. It was indeed published in Izvestia , accompanied by an editorial introduction commenting that even “an open enemy of Leninism” like Kautsky recognised “the greatness of the genius of the proletarian revolution”. The article was later published in the Austro-Marxist theoretical journal Der Kampf (Vol.17, No.5, May 1924, pp.176-9), as Ein Brief übe