After the victory of the October Revolution, revolutionary socialist parties and groups all over the world tried to follow in their organisation structure the so called "Leninist party model". The author of the discussion paper argues that this special Leninist party model never existed – the Bolshevik Party followed especially organisation standards of western social democratic parties. What subsequent revolutionary movements regarded as the ideal model was in fact the simplified version of the Bolshevik Party's structure, which developed after the party had taken the power and which was infected with bureaucratic distortions. Insisting on this wrong organisational model has greatly contributed to the defeat of revolutionary socialism in the 20^th Century.