In general, the Bolsheviks and subsequent leaders of the USSR thought more highly of the French Revolution and were generally dismissive of the American Revolution. From the perspective of Marxist-Leninism, the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution against monarchical authority that allowed for a transfer of power to the capitalist classes. The ease of that transition meant that the American Revolution was conforming in an orthodox fashion to Marxist laws of dialectical materialism and historical development.

From the perspective of the the Bolsheviks, the French Revolution was a different animal. Bolshevik and later Soviet writers would emphasize that although the animating force behind the Revolution was bourgeois dissatisfaction with feudal absolutism, the Jacobins allied with peasantry and the urban proletariat to try and push the Revolution to further radicalism. Presenting the Jacobin Terror as attempt to use revolutionary means to create a new human society meshed well with the ideology of the Bolsheviks. Here, Lenin and his ilk were actually departing from Marx who asserted that the Jacobins were largely bourgeois revolutionaries.

The failure of the Jacobins led to the French Revolution assuming the figure of a tragic prequel in Soviet historiography. Lenin would actually contend that whereas the French Revolution had pretenses towards universality, 1917 was the genuine article because it does not have to compromise with bourgeois interests. In his 1904 treatise One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, a Bolshevik (then known as revolutionary Social Democrats) needed to be “a Jacobin indissolubly connected with the organization of the proletariat.”

Sources

Dement’ev, I. I. "The American Revolution." Entry in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia 3rd Edition (1970-1979), accessed http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/american+Revolution

Furet, Francois. The passing of an illusion: The idea of communism in the twentieth century. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Manfred, A. Z. "The French Revolution." Entry in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia 3rd Edition (1970-1979), accessed http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/French+Revolution

Mayer, Robert. "Lenin and the Jacobin identity in Russia." Studies in East European Thought 51, no. 2 (1999): 127-154.