Bolshevism at a Deadlock was written Karl Kautsky, one of the leading Marxist intellectuals of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in response to the catastrophic failures of Stalin's first Five Year Plan, which was intended to raise Russian industry and productivity to equal that of Western Europe. Kautsky sets out to demonstrate how the repressive autocracy of the Bolsheviks and the disregard for economic exigencies achieved nothing more than "the wholesale pauperisation and degradation of the Russian people", and prophesies the imminent collapse of Soviet Russia in the face of mass famine, ideological dogmatism and, ultimately, the failures inherent in the 1917 Revolution itself.

Kautsky's analysis of the situation of Socialist Russia at the beginning of the troubled 1930s will be of interest to students of pre-war Soviet political practice, economic history and domestic policy.