7. The Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution began on International Working Women’s Day, on 23 February 1917 (Julian calendar). After five days of the Russian workers being mobilised on the streets, the Tsar was toppled. Nine months later, in October 1917, the workers had seized power. Rosa Luxemburg followed the events in Russia as closely as she possibly could from her prison cell, welcoming the revolution with enthusiasm, which was clearly demonstrated by her letters. This enthusiasm pervaded Luxemburg’s attitude in the following period, which is evident even in the very text that is so often used to portray Luxemburg as an arch opponent of Bolshevism:

In the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten:^[1] “I have dared!”

This is essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realisation of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia, the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism’.^[2]

Rosa Luxemburg saw the Russian Revolution as commencing the world socialist revolution. In sharp contrast to the SPD and the leaders of the Second International who had betrayed the workers, the Bolsheviks in Russia had cut a path forward towards the world socialist revolution.

But before we examine Luxemburg’s assessment of these mighty events, we must first give them their appropriate context. As such, it is necessary to sketch the outlines of the revolution and the events of its first year. The subject matter we are dealing with constitutes perhaps the most denigrated chapter in world history. Retrieving the real course of events amidst all the lies that surround them is impossible without delving into the subject in some depth. As such, we assume a degree of patience from the reader.

The October Revolution

The October Revolution was the culmination of a process beginning nine months earlier on 23 February 1917. On this date, the women workers of Petrograd^[3] decided that they had had enough: enough of the war; of the lack of food; of standing in endless breadlines in the freezing cold – in a word, they had had enough of their misery. They decided to strike, and the male workers soon joined them. In a matter of days, the movement had developed into a general strike in Petrograd. In just five days, the hated Tsar was forced to abdicate.

It was a movement that had erupted spontaneously. None of the parties were responsible for the initiative that had ended in the Tsar’s downfall. The local Bolsheviks had even advised the women not to take action, believing that it was premature and would certainly be crushed. In its earliest stages, the movement lacked any organisation. The fact that the regime fell so swiftly before this spontaneous, elemental movement testifies as much to the degree of rottenness of the regime as to the strength of the movement.

On the evening of the Tsar’s abdication, the old State Duma – a parliamentary body formally elected in 1912, but relegated to a purely consultative role by the Tsar – declared the formation of an unelected provisional government. Also on the same evening, a soviet was established in Petrograd by the leaders of the workers’ parties, and a call was sent out for all workers and soldiers to elect deputies to the soviet, as they had done in 1905. This marked the beginning of a period that Lenin referred to as ‘dual power’, in which the government of the bourgeoisie and organs of workers’ power (soviets), existed alongside each other. But, ultimately one class would have to triumph over the other. The interests of the working class and the bourgeoisie are diametrically opposed and utterly incompatible. Such a situation could not be sustained indefinitely.

The days that immediately followed the February Revolution, however, were days of rejoicing. The Tsar was gone, a number of democratic rights were implemented, and the revolutionaries could return home from exile. But as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, it became clear to the masses that toppling the Tsar had not fundamentally changed society. The landlords still reigned in the countryside, while the majority of the peasants owned either no land whatsoever or else tiny plots that could not feed a whole family; workers had no bread; and last but not least, the hated war was continuing. The masses further radicalised. In the early days of the revolution, they placed their hopes in the moderate socialists – the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who between them, had a majority in the soviets. By mid-April, the commitment foreign minister Milyukov had made to Russia’s allies to continue the war to “its glorious conclusion” had been leaked, which provoked massive demonstrations of workers and soldiers. To stave off the crisis, after negotiations, six Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik ministers were included in the provisional government, with Alexander Kerensky as Minister of War. These ministers thus stood with one foot in each camp of the dual power. But the promises they made to the masses remained mere words. As such, the masses moved further to the left, towards the Bolsheviks.

The revolution found the most important Bolshevik leaders in exile, and those who were in Petrograd at the beginning of the revolution had a hard time orienting themselves politically. As in 1905, many of the old Bolsheviks, the so-called ‘committeemen’, initially suffered from a lack of clarity about the revolution. Stalin, along with Kamenev, was one of the first members of the Bolshevik central committee to return to Petrograd in 1917. The two immediately took over the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda. Among other things, they used its pages to defend a position of conditional, critical support for the provisional government and the continuation of the war. Lenin, who was yet to return from his Swiss exile, became increasingly alarmed by the policies that the party was defending. Lenin wrote one letter after another to the Bolshevik central committee, later published in a collection with the title Letters from Afar. In them, he argued that the party must immediately withdraw its support from the provisional government and the war, and that it must advance an independent programme of the working class.

In April 1917, Lenin finally managed to return to Russia, just in time for a conference of the Bolshevik Party. There he put forward his famous ‘April Theses’, in which he explained that the first stage of the revolution was over. The time had arrived for the second stage: the struggle for the workers to seize power. The theses arrived like a thunderclap for the Bolshevik leadership, none of whom were as yet ready to subscribe to these views, and many openly opposed them. The perspective that Lenin outlined in the ‘April Theses’ closely resembled Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. In fact, so close was the resemblance that some actually accused Lenin of having converted to Trotskyism. Indeed, Trotsky was in full agreement with Lenin’s line, and in August of 1917, he joined the Bolshevik Party.^[4]

According to Lenin, the task of the Bolsheviks was to win over the masses by “patiently explaining”. He argued that the masses would compare the words and deeds of the moderate socialists through experience. In so doing, they would come to realise the limitations of these leaders. Such experience would teach the masses that they could only rely upon their own strength, and that they themselves had to seize power. Such an approach was summarised in Lenin’s slogan, “all power to the soviets”, which he raised precisely at a time when the moderate socialists held the majority and leading positions in the soviets. The message of the slogan was essentially: take the power that the masses have given you; match your fine words with deeds.

The tremendous influx of fresh revolutionaries into the party allowed Lenin to win the day at the April conference, despite opposition from large parts of the Bolshevik leadership. With time, however, experience taught most of the party leaders the correctness of Lenin’s ideas. Between May and June, the ‘socialist’ ministers – and Kerensky in particular – played a key role in the attempt to revive the war effort. They supported the decision to launch a military offensive against Germany in spite of the extreme weariness and exhaustion of the soldiers at the front. The ‘June offensive’ was an unmitigated disaster, provoking huge territorial losses and open mutinies among the troops. Frustration in the provisional government grew. Strikes and demonstrations intensified, and peasant rebellions broke out in the countryside. The slogan “all power to the Soviets” became the main demand rising from the streets. The workers and soldiers of Petrograd in particular were running out of patience. In July, they decided to take to the streets in an armed demonstration to pressure the moderate socialists, who held the majority in the soviet, to move from words to deeds, and to keep their promises. But when they were given a clear choice, the ‘socialist’ ministers chose to side with the bourgeoisie. Soldiers were called in from the front to suppress the protests.

The Bolsheviks understood that the workers and soldiers in Petrograd had reached more advanced revolutionary conclusions than the rest of the working class, let alone the peasant masses in key parts of the country who also made up important sections of the army. These layers would follow suit, but more time was needed to win them over. A premature insurrection in Petrograd could still be isolated and crushed. For this reason, the Bolsheviks tried to dissuade them, but it became clear that the masses could not be held back. The Bolsheviks then decided to join the masses in order to ensure the greatest possible organisation and discipline in the protests. For two days the Petrograd workers and soldiers conquered the streets, displaying their sheer determination, though the movement was short of an open insurrection. However, as soon as ‘trusted’ troops could be mustered from the front, the government responded with bloody repression. They accused the Bolsheviks of treason and attacked them as ‘German agents’. The party was banned. Armed reactionaries, including the Black Hundreds, were used to put down any resistance. Trotsky was arrested, whilst Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders were forced into hiding.

The setback suffered by the Bolsheviks turned out to only be temporary – a price they had to pay in order to maintain and strengthen their connection with the revolutionary masses. At the time, however, this was not at all obvious, and it seemed to many that the revolution was lost and that counter-revolution would surely be victorious. The situation changed dramatically when the arch-reactionary commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Kornilov, marched his troops on Petrograd in late August in an attempt to seize power and crush the soviets. Kornilov’s attempted coup had acted, in the words of Marx, as the “whip of the counter-revolution”, which spurred the revolution onward once more. The provisional government, now headed by Kerensky and led by the moderate socialists, had to come crawling before the Bolsheviks, pleading for help to stop Kornilov. The Bolsheviks accepted, demanded and organised the arming of the Petrograd workers, and took a decisive lead in the struggle against the counter-revolution. However, they also used the occasion to expose the powerlessness of Kerensky and the provisional government. Kornilov was beaten back by the efforts of the Bolsheviks. This further radicalised the masses and increasingly drove them behind the Bolsheviks. The scales were tipped, in one soviet after another, in the direction of Bolshevik majorities. They could now expect to win a majority at the forthcoming All-Russian Congress of Soviets, due to meet in October.

The revolution was approaching its climax. The masses were mobilised and confident. The ruling class was demoralised. It was clear to Lenin, Trotsky and some of the other Bolshevik leaders that the current situation could not last much longer. Either the workers would launch an uprising and seize power, or else inaction would pave the way for demoralisation, momentum would once more swing back to the ruling class and the counter-revolution would enact its bloody vengeance as it had after the 1905 Revolution and the Paris Commune fifty years earlier.

The revolution had to take a decisive step forward. On the eve of the opening of the Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks organised an armed uprising in Petrograd. Strategic points in the city were occupied by revolutionary soldiers and workers under the command of the Petrograd soviet. But long before the insurrection, the Bolsheviks had already won over the majority of workers and soldiers in Petrograd.

On 25 October, representatives from soviets all over Russia gathered in Petrograd for the second^[5] All-Russian Congress of Soviets. This was no mere gathering of career politicians. On the contrary, the Soviet Congress directly represented the workers and soldiers of Russia. It was a democratic gathering, the only historical precedent with which it could hitherto be compared was the Paris Commune of 1871. At the congress there was a clear majority for the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The latter represented a left-wing split from Kerensky and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which had been the dominant force among the revolutionary oriented rural petty bourgeoisie and peasants in the period from February to October, but which was now divided between a right wing, representing the richer peasants and the intelligentsia of the cities, and a left wing representing the far more revolutionary poor peasants and agricultural workers.

The Bolsheviks placed a simple proposal before the Congress of Soviets: the congress was to put an end to the dual power period by seizing power into its own hands. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries supported the Bolshevik demand for soviet power. When the Mensheviks and Right Social Revolutionaries realised they were in a minority, they walked out of the congress. The congress, however, continued in their absence. It now voted to officially depose the provisional government. In its place it elected the new All-Russian Central Executive Committee – a kind of parliament, but one in which the representatives could be recalled by the Congress of Soviets and whose deputies received no more than the wage of a skilled worker; and a new Soviet government – the Council of People’s Commissars. The Congress immediately issued an appeal to all the warring nations to begin negotiations for a peace without annexations, and a resolution distributing the land among the peasants. World history was being written. From the Congress, the revolution spread across Russia and far beyond its borders, like a wildfire on a parched landscape.

In the history textbooks, the October Revolution is often portrayed as a bloody affair. The Russian Civil War that followed it certainly was blood-soaked and violent, as wars generally are. What is remarkable about the October Revolution, however, is just how peaceful it actually was. It is said that more people died during the filming of Eisenstein’s reproduction of the storming of the Winter Palace for the 1927 film October than died in the actual storming of the Winter Palace. Such a peaceful seizure of power was possible on account of the work that the Bolsheviks had conducted before the insurrection. Through meetings and discussions, they had won the great majority over to the side of the revolution, and particularly the workers and soldiers of Petrograd. A revolutionary situation cannot last long. Given such a crisis, the presence of a revolutionary party is essential. And it was precisely the presence of the Bolshevik Party in Russia in 1917 that secured the victory of the revolution, and furthermore that its victory was organised and disciplined, and therefore, peaceful.

Year One of the Revolution^[6]

The October Revolution, however, could not achieve miracles nor wish away its problems. In many ways, it was not until the seizure of power was effected that the difficulties really began. It is precisely these difficulties that Luxemburg examines in her famous article about the Russian Revolution. In order to understand Luxemburg’s approach to the questions, and on account of the extent to which her writings on the question have been manipulated since her death, it is necessary to subject the events of the first year of the Russian Revolution to examination.

The Bolsheviks had seized power in a country that was economically devastated. Even prior to the First World War, on numerous measures, Russia was far more backward than the advanced capitalist countries. The vast majority of the population still lived in the countryside under semi-feudal conditions, farming with the same methods their families had used for centuries. The war, however, had ripped the sons of the peasantry from the land, and had forced them into the army, where they joined millions of others in the enormous meat grinder that was the First World War. On top of the war, much of the country’s productive capacity had collapsed. The result was a population living on the bare minimum of subsistence.

Furthermore, despite the fact that the old ruling class had been deposed by the revolution, the capitalists, nobles, and officers were not about to accept the loss of their power, fortunes, and privileges without a fight. They initiated a bloody war against the country’s new rulers, in which they were able to count upon the support of the imperialist powers. The latter landed twenty-one foreign armies onto the soil of the new Soviet Republic in order to reinstate the old ruling class and crush the new Soviet power. The fact that the revolution not only held out against this overwhelming enemy but emerged victorious, demonstrated precisely the level of support it enjoyed among the Russian people.

The Bolsheviks not only inherited a devastated economy, they also inherited a state apparatus which was falling to bits. The army and the civil administration were in a state of dissolution. The new Soviet Republic had to start over. The art of administering an entire nation, state apparatus, army and economy had to be learnt overnight – something the old ruling class had had centuries to get to grips with. Without having had so much as a moment to breathe and consolidate its rule, the new regime was immediately thrown into the fire.

Immediately upon assuming power in October, the soviet government had to navigate a particularly tricky question: what to do about the Constituent Assembly? The Provisional Government had postponed convening the Constituent Assembly time and again. The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, had raised this slogan for years, even prior to the revolution, in opposition to the tsarist dictatorship. The Bolsheviks conceived the Constituent Assembly as a step forward in comparison with the dictatorship of a tsar or an unelected bourgeois Provisional Government.

However, the entire period from February to October 1917 had above all shown that bourgeois parliamentarianism was utterly incapable of delivering peace or bread to the peasants, and that the two forms of state power – bourgeois parliament and workers’ soviet democracy – that is, a situation of dual power, could not coexist side by side. Nonetheless, under pressure from more moderate elements in the Soviet regime, and on account of the fact that the Bolsheviks had indeed raised this demand for many years, elections to the Constituent Assembly were called shortly after the October Revolution. All parties participated in them – the Bolsheviks included – but each held very different expectations. The bourgeoisie had given up entirely on the idea of a bourgeois democratic regime. Instead, they unanimously favoured installing a ‘strongman’ in power in the form of some type of military dictatorship. The petty bourgeoisie and its political representatives in the form of the Socialist Revolutionaries, meanwhile, placed all their hopes in the Constituent Assembly. Through it, they imagined they would become the ruling parliamentary party on the morrow.

Indeed, a majority of votes cast in the Constituent Assembly elections went to the Socialist Revolutionaries. More than 36 million people voted, of whom about 13 per cent voted for the bourgeois parties (the Cadets, etc.), 4 per cent for the Mensheviks, 25 per cent for the Bolsheviks, and 58 per cent for the Socialist Revolutionaries.^[7]

But history had overtaken the Constituent Assembly. The election to the Constituent Assembly was based on electoral lists that the parties had drawn up prior to the October Revolution. As such, whilst the Socialist Revolutionaries went into the election with the list of a once unified party, by the time the elections took place, the party had actually split in two. One half, the right wing, was fiercely opposed to the new Soviet regime. The left wing, on the contrary, supported the October Revolution. By the end of 1917, there were seven Left Socialist Revolutionary commissars in the Soviet government, the Council of People’s Commissars. From a membership point of view, the Socialist Revolutionaries had more or less split down the middle. The right wing found its support primarily in the upper echelons of the party and in its apparatus, while the left wing had a majority among the rank-and-file membership. On the electoral lists, therefore, the right wing made up three quarters of the party’s candidates. This gave a majority in the Constituent Assembly to enemies of the October Revolution, but this was not reflective of opinion in the Socialist Revolutionary party or in the country at large.

The Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries therefore put an ultimatum to the Constituent Assembly at its opening session (in early January 1918): that it broadly acknowledge the decisions of the Congress of Soviets on the decrees of peace, land for the peasants, etc. When this ultimatum was rejected, the two parties left, and the assembly was closed shortly thereafter.

In essence, the question of the Constituent Assembly was a question of either defending the new Soviet power or of returning to the unstable pre-October situation of dual power. The period from February 1917 to the October Revolution had demonstrated the impossibility of the organs of power of two hostile classes coexisting side by side. One would have to choose between workers’ power – as expressed through the soviets, or the rule of the bourgeoisie – as expressed through the Constituent Assembly. Had the Soviet power accepted the Constituent Assembly, it would have amounted to annulling the results of the October Revolution and handing power back to the bourgeoisie and the landlords, a course of action which was certainly not favoured by the workers and peasants. The Constituent Assembly lacked any social base, and even the most anti-communist of historians have been forced to admit that only a thin layer even noticed its dissolution. The vast majority of the population – the peasants – wanted land and peace. For the satisfaction of their demands, they looked towards the soviets.

Shortly after the October Revolution, the bourgeoisie, together with the Allied powers, began planning the overthrow of the new Soviet power. In the army, the revolution expressed itself in a conflict between the mass of lower ranking soldiers and the high command and senior officers. The result was the same almost everywhere – the counter-revolutionary command fled to the slightly less hostile Don region in order to regroup their forces, which were composed largely of Junkers and officers. With the assistance of the imperialist powers, they began building up counter-revolutionary armies across Russia – the so-called ‘White Armies’ – with the purpose of exterminating the Bolsheviks and all vestiges of the revolution, such that the workers would not dare to rise up for many generations to come.

On the other side of the class divide stood the Soviet government, which lacked any army whatsoever. The soldiers had begun demobilising even before the October Revolution. The Russian Revolution was born out of the First World War, with one of the foremost demands put forward by the Russian masses being that of peace. As such, the new Soviet government’s first action was precisely to send out an appeal for all warring nations to commence peace negotiations to attain a general, democratic peace without annexations. Russia’s allies in the war – France and Great Britain – met the Soviet government’s appeal for peace with silence. Only Germany, which was at war with Russia, responded, and in December a truce was declared, preceding peace negotiations that would take place at Brest-Litovsk. After initial unsuccessful negotiations led by Adolph Joffe, Trotsky was charged with leading the Soviet delegation.

The representatives of the new soviet Republic were faced with a daunting task. De facto, the Russian army was in a state of complete dissolution. The soldiers had not waited to demobilise, and had simply abandoned their positions, leaving the road to Petrograd wide open. The Soviet government possessed no force capable of stopping a German advance against the capital, which would inevitably end with the crushing of the revolution. Peace negotiations were the only option if the Soviet power wished to survive. The Germans, however, made ghastly demands. Not only did they reject the Bolsheviks’ demand that all colonies and annexed territories be released, they themselves demanded that the Soviet regime surrender immense amounts of territory. These territories included several of the Baltic countries, and the majority of modern-day Belarus and Ukraine. In all, it was demanded that 215,000 square kilometres of land, including the most economically important regions of the former Russian Empire, and no less than 20 million Soviet citizens, who had also risen in revolution, be handed over to the German emperor. On top of this, the Germans also demanded that Russia pay 3 billion roubles in war reparations. To concede to such demands would have left the road from Warsaw to Petrograd wide open. The Soviet delegation rejected the German demands, but they were forced to continue negotiations. What alternative did they have? They had no army with which to continue fighting.

The Bolsheviks used the peace negotiations very deftly. All the negotiations were recorded in shorthand and publicised. These tactics allowed the Bolsheviks to use the negotiations as a platform to shout over the heads of the German General Staff to the workers of Germany and the rest of the world. From Brest-Litovsk, the Russian delegation appealed to the workers of the world to rise up and seize power for themselves as the Russian workers had done.

The negotiations generated a massive wave of disagreement within the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government. The ‘left wing’ of the Bolsheviks demanded that the Soviet government reject peace and instead pursue a revolutionary war against the German empire. The Bolsheviks were not pacifists, and they certainly did not rule out revolutionary war if such methods could bring aid to the revolutionary movements in other countries. For them, the world revolution was a consideration that came before all else. But this was a practical question – with which troops were the Soviets to fight such a war? Lenin argued that accepting the German conditions was the only option because continuing the war had simply become impossible. But he also believed that it would be necessary to provoke a breakdown in negotiations in order to make it obvious to the workers, and particularly those in the Allied countries, that there was no alliance between the new Soviet government and Germany. It had to be clear to all that the soviets had not accepted these atrocious conditions voluntarily, but that German imperialism had forced them at gunpoint. In this way, they could reject the smears of the bourgeois media that the Bolsheviks were German agents and that Soviet Russia and Germany were allies. Trotsky’s position, summarised in the slogan, “neither war nor peace”, won a majority in the Soviet government.

On 10 February 1918, Trotsky therefore read aloud a statement to the German delegation on behalf of the Soviet government, informing them that Russia had demobilised its army but would not sign the peace deal. The German emperor was unsure of how to respond to such an unorthodox move. Everything pointed towards carrying through an offensive to crush the young workers’ state, but the emperor vacillated. He was unsure whether the Germans could secure their supply lines for an invasion of Russia, but he was also fearful of how such an invasion would impact the morale of the German soldiers. In the end, he settled on launching an offensive against ‘Bolshevism’. As soon as the German offensive started, the Russians telegraphed the Germans and accepted the peace conditions. But the Germans were no longer in a hurry. Instead, they added further demands to their list. This included the demand that the Russians stop agitating among German troops; that the Russian army be demobilised; that the Soviets recognise the Ukrainian People’s Republic (the response of the counter-revolutionaries to the Ukrainian soviet); and that Finland and the Åland Islands be surrendered, which de facto meant surrendering the Finnish revolution that had just begun. Although they protested, the Russians nevertheless signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Now no one could be in any doubt that there was no alliance between Soviet Russia and Germany. After its signing, the peace deal drew criticism not only from a wing of the Bolshevik Party, the ‘left communists’ led by Bukharin and Radek, but also from the Bolsheviks’ allies, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who withdrew from the Council of People’s Commissars. They remained in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee but it now became clear that possibilities for cooperation between the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks had become extremely strained.

Simultaneously, the counter-revolutionary White forces in Finland gave a demonstration of what awaited the revolutionary workers once reaction succeeded. The Finnish workers had seized power in early 1918, but their Social Democratic leadership vacillated and attempted to remain within the framework of bourgeois democracy. Counter-revolutionary forces mobilised for a counter-offensive, with the support of volunteers from Sweden, Denmark and elsewhere. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Russians were officially compelled to pull out of Finland, leaving the Finnish workers to fight alone. They fought bravely, but could not resist the overwhelming counter-revolutionary forces supported by 20,000 German soldiers. The White forces showed extreme brutality. Their victory was followed by bloody revenge – membership of a workers’ organisation (party, trade union, etc.) meant imprisonment, and shop stewards in the workers’ movement were executed. In total, the counter-revolutionary White Terror is estimated to have killed 30,000 people. This was an important lesson in class warfare. The victorious propertied classes know that in the wake of a revolutionary situation, they can only re-establish their class rule by drowning the revolution in blood and crippling the working class for decades to come.

The counter-revolutionary bloodshed in Finland commenced in April 1918. Until that point, the soviets in Russia had not resorted to political terror. Acts of retaliation were limited to rank-and-file soldiers and sailors settling accounts with their own officers. In Finland, and subsequently everywhere in Russia where the Whites got the upper hand, they clearly demonstrated to the Russian masses what awaited them if they were victorious – workers, communists, and indeed all opponents were rounded up and imprisoned or executed, and pogroms were unleashed against Jews. (It is estimated that the White Volunteer Army of Denikin killed 120,000 Jews alone in its pogroms). The brutal crackdown of the Whites pushed many neutral layers of the population over to the side of the Reds, in the following months and years, as the civil war progressed.

However, the counter-revolutionary war waged by the Whites had just begun. It was supported financially and by direct military intervention by all the imperialist powers against the Revolution. The bourgeois press in Russia, which still operated openly and legally after the October Revolution, started a hysterical campaign in the spring of 1918 to sow panic. In May, they reported that the Germans were sending forces to Moscow and Petrograd, and that the Bolsheviks were contemplating forming a coalition government with them. In response to this clearly slanderous campaign, proceedings were initiated against about a dozen bourgeois newspapers, which were made illegal along with a couple of Socialist Revolutionary newspapers.

The situation in Russia was desperate. Hunger was widespread, and Soviet-controlled regions were surrounded on all sides by counter-revolutionary forces. This was the backdrop against which a number of restrictions of democratic rights were carried out in the first year of the revolution. Once the German offensive started, all newspapers that showed hostility to the revolutionary defence or sympathy towards the German invaders were closed.

As hunger spread, some layers of the population became open to the propaganda of the counter-revolutionaries. In some places there were even uprisings. The revolution was hanging by a thread. In reality there was wheat, but it was hoarded by wealthy peasants because the money with which the government was offering to buy their grain was considered worthless. As such, in order to feed the cities, the Bolsheviks were forced to organise armed divisions of workers, which were sent out to the countryside to collect surplus grain from the wealthier peasants. Thus began a civil war in the countryside in order to secure wheat for the hungry workers in the city and at the front.

After the seizure of power by the counter-revolution in Ukraine, which had been torn out of the control of the Soviets by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a counter-revolutionary campaign was initiated across all of Russia. Until the end of April 1918, the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries had officially opposed armed struggle against the soviets. Now, however, they gave direct assistance to the armed rebellion of the counter-revolution.

The soviet system had proved to be exceptionally democratic. In the soviets, questions were discussed and decided upon by elected representatives, and all parties that did not actively fight against the soviet power were afforded full freedom. The third All-Russian Congress of Soviets in January 1918, among other measures, approved the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People as a basis of the Soviet Constitution and established the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries used the Congress to openly vent their opposition to the revolutionary measures. An extraordinary fourth Congress was convened in March to ratify the Brest-Litovsk treaty, which was vehemently opposed for different reasons by Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries. But when the Mensheviks and the Right Socialist Revolutionaries actively joined the civil war on the side of counter-revolution, the Bolsheviks responded by putting forward a resolution excluding from the soviets all those parties that encouraged civil war and allied themselves with the enemy. This was obviously a necessary step. It is hard to imagine what bourgeois government would ever allow armed parties fighting against their system to operate legally, even more so in a war situation. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, however, now took another step towards a break with the Bolsheviks, voting against the resolution. Nonetheless, it was still passed, and the counter-revolutionary ‘socialist’ parties were ejected from the soviets.

In July 1918, delegates gathered for the fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The Bolsheviks held the majority with 773 out of 1,164 delegates. The leader of the newborn Red Army, Leon Trotsky, put forward a resolution proposing harsh measures against anyone continuing to encourage war with Germany. A fierce debate erupted. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries had not only been dissatisfied with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk – they were even more hostile to the policy of the Bolsheviks towards the peasants. The Bolsheviks had attempted to ally themselves with the poorest peasants, while the base of support of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries was among the middle layer of the peasantry. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries were hostile to grain requisitions and wanted to continue the war with Germany to reconquer grain-producing regions. At the same time, they were hostile to the Whites because the middle peasants were also harshly oppressed under the old tsarist regime. They accused the Bolsheviks, among other things, of impoverishing the peasants and of being in league with the Germans. During the congress, news arrived of the murder of the German ambassador, Count Mirbach, in Moscow. The assassination had been carried out by Left Socialist Revolutionaries who served in the secret police, the Cheka, with the intention of provoking a war with Germany. At the same time, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries occupied the central postal office in Moscow, and from there sent out telegrams declaring the decisions of the Council of People’s Commissars void, and proclaiming the Socialist Revolutionary Party to be the only governing party. That is to say, they attempted to carry out a coup. This led to armed clashes in which the uprising was defeated. Thus, the alliance between the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries came to an end, and the latter broke up as a party. The Congress resumed its work on 9-10 July after the uprising was defeated and resolved to ban the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, leaving the door open to all Socialist Revolutionary organisations that would disown the actions of their party’s Central Committee.

The civil war raged on. On all fronts, the White armies advanced with a great deal of support from the European powers. A joint English–American–French expeditionary force landed in Murmansk on 2 July; Japanese and American forces landed in Vladivostok, and the Czechoslovak Legion^[8] took control along the Volga and in the Urals. Behind the advancing lines of the Whites, workers and ‘Reds’ were summarily executed; captured cities were purged, and the Whites attempted to terrorise the population into submission. The rich peasants withheld their wheat from the cities, where hunger was rampant. The soviets were isolated. The White armies enjoyed the support of twenty-one armies of foreign intervention, sent by the world’s mightiest imperialist powers. The revolution was hanging by a thin thread indeed.

A few weeks later, in August 1918, the Socialist Revolutionaries attempted to assassinate Lenin, who was gravely wounded. Meanwhile, an attempt to assassinate Uritsky, the chairman of the Cheka in Petrograd, was successful. As such, the Bolsheviks’ decision to institute the so-called ‘Red Terror’ in autumn 1918 – in which food saboteurs and supporters of the counter-revolution were summarily executed – was not taken on a whim. Rather it was a desperate and defensive measure in response to the White Terror in the context of a class war that was being fought to the death.

The fact that one soviet party after another went over to the counter-revolution left power in the soviets concentrated in the hands of the Bolsheviks, who were now the only ruling party. This was not a desirable situation, but it was nevertheless the product of a long chain of causes and effects. The perspective of the Bolsheviks was to hold on until the world revolution came to the rescue of the Russian workers. If they allowed the counter-revolution to win, it would not only lead to a fascist dictatorship in Russia, it would also demoralise the international working class. Defeat in Russia would have thus tremendously strengthened counter-revolution internationally.

Meanwhile, Rosa Luxemburg was languishing in jail. Her enthusiastic support for the October Revolution is documented in her letters to Luise Kautsky as early as November 1917. She followed the Russian events as closely as she could for the following twelve months until her release from prison. However, her access to direct and accurate information was extremely limited. As she admitted in a letter she wrote from Breslau prison to her comrade Julian Marchlewski at the end of July 1918, information “reaches me only third-hand [about] the actual state of affairs [in Soviet Russia]”.^[9]

In the same letter, she expressed the concern that the “spectre of an alliance [of the Bolsheviks] with the ‘Middle Kingdom’ [Germany] seems to become ever more threatening”.

Such extreme concern was at the centre of an article Luxemburg wrote later, in September, titled ‘The Russian Tragedy’. Her fear was based on the idea that the concessions to Germany that the Bolsheviks had been forced to grant at Brest-Litovsk, and their subsequent retreats in the months that followed, although forced upon them because of the military weakness and isolation of the Revolution, had objectively strengthened German imperialism, thus postponing the perspective of revolution in Germany.

Luxemburg’s fears of such a capitulation were unjustified and she later dropped them altogether. However, she never blamed the Bolsheviks for what she considered to be important mistakes. She put the blame of the impossible situation facing the Russian revolutionaries squarely on the shoulders of the leaders of the German Social Democracy for their betrayal.

Her standpoint had nothing to do with the scepticism of the detractors of Bolshevism. It was the standpoint of a revolutionary whose exclusive concern was to fight for the best conditions that would guarantee the triumph of the international proletariat in the socialist revolution.

In the autumn of 1918, Rosa Luxemburg wrote the draft of a longer article, which she herself did not publish, but which was published posthumously and has subsequently been used to present a distorted image of her view of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks. This article was titled ‘The Russian Revolution’.

The Misuse of Luxemburg’s ‘The Russian Revolution’

The Russian Revolution was a tremendous source of inspiration for workers all over the world. For the first time, the workers managed to seize power, to hold it, and to take the first steps towards building a socialist society. Among the first steps of the new Soviet government, for instance, following the land reform and the appeal for peace was the establishment of legal equality for men and women. The right to divorce and abortion was legalised. Russia showed the whole world that society does not need capitalists, landlords or bankers in order to function. Quite the contrary, in fact.

It is no wonder then that a deluge of literature has been and continues to be published in order to smear the Russian Revolution. The sole aim of this literature is to scare workers and youth away from attempting to change society. But these smears do not merely originate from the bourgeoisie. Many so-called left-wingers have also engaged in the same slander campaign, and in their efforts, Rosa Luxemburg is often held aloft in what is a reformist crusade against Lenin, Bolshevism, and the Russian Revolution.

As mentioned above, Luxemburg wrote a long article about the October Revolution titled ‘The Russian Revolution’. It is always from this article that quotes are drawn as ammunition for this campaign. Luxemburg wrote this piece from her prison cell in the autumn of 1918 as the young Soviet regime, as we have seen, faced a dire situation, with restrictions on democratic rights applied as a result of the civil war. If one reads Luxemburg’s articles in their entirety, it is clear that she was fully conscious of the dire situation in Russia. There is no evidence at all to suggest that Luxemburg was opposed to the October Revolution. Quite the contrary. The very article begins and ends with unconditional support of the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution.

In the beginning of the article, after a scathing critique of the Mensheviks and their political equivalents in Germany represented by Kautsky, she writes the following lines about the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution:

In this situation, the Bolshevik tendency performs the historic service of having proclaimed from the very beginning, and having followed with iron consistency, those tactics which alone could save democracy and drive the revolution ahead. All power exclusively in the hands of the worker and peasant masses, in the hands of the soviets – this was indeed the only way out of the difficulty into which the revolution had gotten; this was the sword stroke with which they cut the Gordian knot, freed the revolution from a narrow blind-alley and opened up for it an untrammelled path into the free and open fields.

The party of Lenin was thus the only one in Russia which grasped the true interest of the revolution in that first period. It was the element that drove the revolution forward, and, thus it was the only party which really carried on a socialist policy. It is this which makes clear, too, why it was that the Bolsheviks, though they were at the beginning of the revolution a persecuted, slandered and hunted minority attacked on all sides, arrived within the shortest time to the head of the revolution and were able to bring under their banner all the genuine masses of the people: the urban proletariat, the army, the peasants, as well as the revolutionary elements of democracy, the left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

The real situation, in which the Russian Revolution found itself, narrowed down in a few months to the alternative: victory of the counter-revolution or dictatorship of the proletariat – Kaledin^[10] or Lenin. Such was the objective situation, just as it quickly presents itself in every revolution after the first intoxication is over, and as it presented itself in Russia as a result of the concrete, burning questions of peace and land, for which there was no solution within the framework of ‘bourgeois’ revolution.

In this, the Russian Revolution has but confirmed the basic lesson of every great revolution, the law of its being, which decrees: either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy, resolute tempo, break down all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backward behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counter-revolution. To stand still, to mark time on one spot, to be contented with the first goal it happens to reach, is never possible in revolution. And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book [sealed] with seven seals. […]

The ‘golden mean’ cannot be maintained in any revolution. The law of its nature demands a quick decision: either the locomotive drives forward full steam ahead to the most extreme point of the historical ascent, or it rolls back of its own weight again to the starting point at the bottom; and those who would keep it with their weak powers half way up the hill, drags it down irredeemably into the abyss.

Thus it is clear that in every revolution only that party capable of seizing the leadership and power has the courage to issue the appropriate watchwords for driving the revolution ahead, and the courage to draw all the necessary conclusions from the situation. This makes clear, too, the miserable role of the Russian Mensheviks, the Dans,^[11] Tseretelis,^[12] etc., who had enormous influence on the masses at the beginning, but, after their prolonged wavering and after they had fought with both hands and feet against taking over power and responsibility, were driven ignobly off the stage.

The party of Lenin was the only one which grasped the mandate and duty of a truly revolutionary party and which, by the slogan – “All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry” – insured the continued development of the revolution.

Thereby the Bolsheviks solved the famous problem of “winning a majority of the people”, which problem has ever weighed on the German Social-Democracy like a nightmare. As bred-in-the-bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the home-made wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to a revolution: first let’s become a “majority”. The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that’s the way the road runs.

Only a party which knows how to lead, that is, to advance things, wins support in stormy times. The determination with which, at the decisive moment, Lenin and his comrades offered the only solution which could advance things (“all power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry”), transformed them almost overnight from a persecuted, slandered, outlawed minority whose leader had to hide like Marat^[13] in cellars, into the absolute master of the situation.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks immediately set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far reaching revolutionary program; not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realising socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical politics.

Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary far-sightedness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and all the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honour and capacity which western Social-Democracy lacked was represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honour of international socialism.^[14]

This quote illustrates Luxemburg’s opinion of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks with all the clarity that anyone could wish for. The critiques that she raises beyond this point in the article are connected to concrete aspects of Bolshevik policy following October: on the land question, the national question, and restrictions to democracy. We will deal with these concrete criticisms later.

It must be noted that Luxemburg did not write this article for publication. Luxemburg sent an unfinished draft of it to Paul Levi, who had taken over the editing of the Spartacus Letters following the arrest of Jogiches in March 1918. Attached to the draft was a note, stating: “I am writing this pamphlet only for you and if I can convince you then the effort isn’t wasted.”^[15] The article was not published until years after Luxemburg’s death, being released to the public by Levi in 1922 who by that time had been excluded from the Communist Party. In short, it is an incomplete text that was written by Luxemburg for the purpose of private discussion, and above all to clarify her own thoughts.^[16] Furthermore, it should be noted that it bears the marks of having been written whilst Luxemburg herself was in prison, at a time where she therefore had only limited access to detailed information and could not exchange views openly with her comrades about what she thought.^[17]

To take one example, we can see this in the critique she levels at the Bolsheviks for some of their harsher actions, such as the restrictions on democracy and the Red Terror. Her criticisms are abstract and without context, despite the fact that she continually emphasises in the same article that the choices that the Bolsheviks face cannot be separated from the concrete situation and that they are the result of an “inevitable chain of causes and effects”:

Everything that happens in Russia is comprehensible and represents an inevitable chain of causes and effects, the starting point and end term of which are: the failure of the German proletariat and the occupation of Russia by German imperialism. It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy. By their determined revolutionary stand, their exemplary strength in action, and their unbreakable loyalty to international socialism, they have contributed whatever could possibly be contributed under such devilishly hard conditions.^[18]

The article ends as it began: with glowing praise for the Bolsheviks:

The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of historical possibilities. They are not supposed to perform miracles. For a model and faultless proletarian revolution in an isolated land, exhausted by world war, strangled by imperialism, betrayed by the international proletariat, would be a miracle.

What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescences in the politics of the Bolsheviks. In the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: “I have dared!”

This is essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realisation of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia, the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism’.^[19]

Nothing in this assertion can be twisted to sound like Luxemburg being in any way in opposition to either the October Revolution or the Bolsheviks. The reformists are only able to use her against the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks by ripping her quotes out of their context and in such a way distorting her words to say the exact opposite of what she is actually saying. For those who still have doubts, all we can do is encourage them to read her article in its full extent.

This positive approach to the revolution is fundamental to the meaning of Luxemburg’s article, as evidenced by the fact that she chose to open and close the article in such a manner. It was between these two extracts, in the context of the words of praise we have just quoted, that Luxemburg put forward her concrete criticisms, which we will now examine.

The Land Question

The first point of critique that Luxemburg aimed at the Bolsheviks was their policy with regards to the land question. She contended that, despite their own wishes, the Bolsheviks by their policy had inadvertently ended up supporting the counter-revolution and thus weakened the prospects of the revolution. In her opinion, a socialist policy towards the land question must rest on two prerequisites: the nationalisation of the land of the large landlords, and the fusion of agriculture with industry:

In the first place, only the nationalisation of the large landed estates, as the technically most advanced and most concentrated means and methods of agrarian production, can serve as the point of departure for the socialist mode of production on the land.^[20]

The small peasant could keep his land, according to Luxemburg, and through the power of example would become convinced of the benefits of economies of scale. A prerequisite of this would be:

[T]hat the separation between rural economy and industry which is so characteristic of bourgeois society, should be ended in such a way as to bring about a mutual interpenetration and fusion of both, to clear the way for the planning of both agrarian and industrial production according to a unified point of view.^[21]

How this would be practically administered, however, was unimportant in Luxemburg’s opinion. The more important point was that this would only be made possible through the prior nationalisation of large and medium landed property.

Luxemburg did not blame the Bolsheviks for not yet having commenced such reforms on account of the fact that they had many other problems which they were struggling against:

That the Soviet government in Russia has not carried through these mighty reforms – who can reproach them for that! It would be a sorry jest indeed to demand or expect of Lenin and his comrades that, in the brief period of their rule, in the centre of the gripping whirlpool of domestic and foreign struggles, ringed about by countless foes and opponents – to expect that under such circumstances they should already have solved, or even tackled, one of the most difficult tasks, indeed, we can safely say, the most difficult task of the socialist transformation of society! Even in the West, under the most favourable conditions, once we have come to power, we too will break many a tooth on this hard nut before we are out of the worst of the thousands of complicated difficulties of this gigantic task!^[22]

She criticised the Bolsheviks on account of the fact that she believed the measures they had implemented did not “lead in the direction of that fundamental prerequisite for a later socialist reform of agriculture” but rather pointed in the opposite direction, and furthermore, that they “even [cut] off the way to such measures; [they pile] up insurmountable obstacles to the socialist transformation of agrarian agriculture”.

Luxemburg criticised the Bolsheviks for increasing the number of owners of private property rather than nationalising it:

The seizure of the landed estates by the peasants according to the short and precise slogan of Lenin and his friends – “Go and take the land for yourselves” – simply led to the sudden, chaotic conversion of large landownership into peasant landownership. What was created is not social property but a new form of private property, namely, the breaking up of large estates into medium and small estates, or relatively advanced large units of production into primitive small units which operate with technical means from the time of the Pharaohs.^[23]

Furthermore, she believed that the chaotic manner in which land division had been conducted would reinforce the class divide in the countryside rather than erasing it. She believed that the end result would be “to the disadvantage of the interests of the proletariat and of socialism”.^[24]

She explained that the tactics of the Bolsheviks were certainly apt for winning over the peasants to the revolution, and that the latter may even attach their fortunes to those of the new government as a result. “But”, Luxemburg said, “it had two sides to it; and the reverse side consisted in the fact that the direct seizure of the land by the peasants has in general nothing at all in common with socialist economy”. In her opinion, it would turn the future socialisation of agriculture into “a question of opposition and of struggle between the urban proletariat and the mass of the peasantry”. Her conclusion was clear:

The Leninist agrarian reform has created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism on the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners.^[25]

From the above critique, we are left in no doubt that her intention was not at all to weaken the new regime, but to rather strengthen it and ease the transition to socialism. She was correct in pointing out the dangers and limitations of the Bolshevik policy, which would be demonstrated in the following years in the growth of an antagonism between the countryside and the city, which grew throughout the course of the civil war until it finally reached a breaking point. In order to forestall a break between the peasantry and the proletariat, the Bolsheviks were forced to introduce the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, which reintroduced an open market in agricultural produce.

It should be noted that, viewed in the abstract, Luxemburg certainly had a point. But concretely, matters were not so simple. As Rosa Luxemburg herself pointed out, the Bolsheviks had no other options given the way things stood. Following her own reasoning, her critique would have read with greater consistency had it been reformulated as a warning, which is incidentally corroborated by the fact that this article was indeed only half-finished.

It should also be added that Luxemburg did not seem to be too well acquainted with the Bolshevik’s actual land policy, a fact which is understandable considering that she was imprisoned. The Bolsheviks had not, as she alleged, created more private property. In the course of the spring and summer of 1917, Russia had been shaken by peasant uprisings. The provisional government, led by the moderate socialists, had attempted to put down these rebellions. The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, directly adopted the programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries on the land question, which essentially amounted to telling the peasants: “Seize the land of the landlords and church and divide it among yourselves”. The Bolsheviks had made it clear that they intended to carry this out and that they would secure land for the peasants. This was how the majority of the peasantry was won to the side of the October Revolution, which was an absolute necessity in a country like Russia where the majority of the population were themselves peasants. And, indeed, once in power, they carried through their promises.

However, the Bolsheviks did not distribute the land as private property. They nationalised the land and confiscated the largest landed estates and distributed it among the peasants under the control of local soviets. The decree on land distribution was one of the first decrees adopted at the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October 1917. It contained the following formulation:

“The landlord’s property in the land is annulled immediately and without any indemnity whatever. The landlord, appanage, monastery and church estates with all their goods and chattels are given in charge of the town land committees and county soviets of peasant deputies until the Constituent Assembly. The confiscated property is placed as a national possession under the protection of the local soviets. The land of the rank-and-file peasants and rank-and-file Cossacks is protected against confiscation.”

And:

The collated instructions read: “The right to private property in the land is annulled for ever.” “The right to use the land is accorded to all citizens… desiring to cultivate it with their own labour.” “Hired labour is not permitted.” “The use of the land must be equalised – that is, the land is to be divided among the toilers according to local conditions on the basis of standards either of labour or consumption.”^[26]

What the practical results of this policy would be were not obvious in October 1917, but according to Trotsky, this was quite intentional. He answered Rosa Luxemburg’s critique as follows:

A great many people, and not only enemies but friends, have failed to understand this far-sighted, and to a certain extent pedagogical, approach of the Bolshevik Party to the peasantry and its agrarian programme. The equal distribution of the land – objected Rosa Luxemburg for example – has nothing in common with socialism. The Bolsheviks, it goes without saying, had no illusion upon this point. On the contrary, the very construction of the decree bears witness to the critical vigilance of the legislator. Whereas the collated instructions say that all the land, both that of the landlords and the peasants, “is converted into national property”, the basic decree does not commit itself at all as to the new form of property in the land. Even a none too pedantic jurist would be horrified at the fact that the nationalisation of the land, a new social principle of world-historic importance, is inaugurated in the form of a list of instructions adjoined to a basic law. But there was no reactionary slovenliness here. Lenin wanted as little as possible to tie the hands of the party and the soviet power a priori in a still unexplored historic realm.

Here again he united unexampled audacity with the greatest caution. It still remained to determine in experience how the peasants themselves would understand the conversion of the land into “the property of the whole people”. Having made so long a dash forward, it was necessary to fortify the positions also in case a retreat should become necessary. The distribution of the landlord’s land among the peasants, while not in itself a guarantee against bourgeois counter-revolution, made impossible in any case a feudal-monarchic restoration.

It would be possible to speak of socialist perspectives only after the establishment and successful preservation of the proletarian power. And this power could preserve itself only by giving determined co-operation to the peasant in carrying out his revolution. If the distribution of the land would strengthen the socialist government politically, it was then wholly justified as an immediate measure. The peasant had to be taken as the revolution found him. Only a new régime could re-educate him – and not at once, but in the course of a generation, with the help of a new technique and a new organisation of industry. The decree together with the instructions meant that the dictatorship of the proletariat assumed an obligation not only to take an attentive attitude toward the interests of the land labourer, but also to be patient of his illusions as a petty proprietor. It was clear in advance that there would be a number of stages and turning-points in the agrarian revolution. The collated instructions were anything but the last word. They represented merely a starting-point which the workers agreed to occupy while helping the peasants to realise their progressive demands, and warning them against false steps.

“We must not ignore”, said Lenin in his speech, “the resolutions of the lower ranks of the people, even though we are not in agreement with them… We must give full freedom to the creative capacity of the popular masses. The essence of the thing is that the peasantry should have full confidence that there are no more landlords in the country, and let the peasants themselves decide all questions and build their own life.” Opportunism? No, it was revolutionary realism.^[27]

So, according to Trotsky, the policy of the Bolsheviks was concretely determined out of concern for the revolution: only by winning over the peasants, could the revolution be victorious.

At least as important as the forms of property ownership was the question of the material foundation on which this ownership was based. Not only had the methods of agriculture themselves remained unchanged for centuries, but the infrastructure of the country had been laid to waste by four years of total destruction in the course of the World War. Nothing was working. Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch. To implement socialist forms of property, that is, collective, industrialised agriculture, in a situation in which the factories were understaffed, the White armies were closing in around Petrograd, and when one could barely send a letter from the capital to the countryside, was pure wishful thinking. The Bolsheviks therefore realised that socialist forms of property in the countryside first and foremost depended on the consolidation of Soviet power, the development of industry in the cities, and the spreading of the revolution internationally to the developed capitalist nations. On this perspective, the Bolsheviks and Luxemburg were in complete agreement. It was the firm conviction of the Bolsheviks that their policy regarding the land question was the one that opened the road to such a perspective. Without it they would never have won over the peasants and there would have been no revolution.

The Right of Nations to Self-Determination

No one familiar with Luxemburg’s views can be surprised to learn that on the national question she criticised the Bolsheviks for sticking to their slogan of the “right of nations to self-determination” after coming to power. As with the other slogans of the Bolshevik party, this policy did not remain a dead letter. It too was carried into practice.

Luxemburg did not pull any punches. She called the thesis on the right of nations to self-determination “opportunism” and “hollow, petty-bourgeois phraseology and humbug”.^[28] Her arguments were the same as those she had raised earlier: the national question was simply exploited by the petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie. She criticised the Bolsheviks for a policy which she believed gave the counter-revolution a powerful tool in its fight against the new soviet regime:

Instead of striving, in the true spirit of the internationalist class policy that they represented in other matters, for the tightest union of the revolutionary forces of the entire territory of the Russian Empire, to defend tooth and nail the integrity of the Empire as a hotbed of revolution, to place the unity and inseparability of the proletarians of all nations in the sphere of the Russian Revolution as the supreme commandment of politics, and to oppose all particular nationalistic aspirations, the Bolsheviks, through their roars of nationalist phrase mongering concerning the “right to self-determination to the point of secession”, have, quite to the contrary given the bourgeoisie in all peripheral countries the most desirable, most brilliant pretext for their counter-revolutionary efforts, and have virtually delivered them a banner under which to carry this out. Instead of warning the proletarians in the peripheral countries against any form of separatism as a bourgeois trap, and instead of nipping separatist tendencies in the bud with an iron fist – the use of which in this case would be in the true spirit of the dictatorship of the proletariat – they have rather confused the masses in all the peripheral countries with their slogan and delivered them to the mercy of the demagogy of the bourgeois classes. Through this nationalist demand they have themselves prepared and brought about the disintegration of Russia, and thus handed the enemy a knife to stab into the heart of the Russian Revolution.^[29]

As with the land question, she criticised Bolshevik policy for not going far enough. With their slogan of the right of nations to self-determination, the Bolsheviks hoped to win over the peoples in the oppressed nations to the side of the revolution. The result, according to Luxemburg, would be the opposite – it would lead to the breakdown and dissolution of Russia, and would therefore strengthen the main enemy of the revolution: imperialism, particularly German imperialism, which would do everything in its power to crush the revolution:

While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of “separation”, they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian Revolution, we have instead witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations’ used the freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian Revolution as its mortal enemy, and, under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself.^[30]

As described earlier, Luxemburg did not believe that there could be anything progressive in the struggle for national independence. She therefore believed that the Bolshevik policy on the question could have no other result than to strengthen the bourgeoisie of the ‘border states’. She wrote off Ukrainian nationalism, for instance, as nothing more than a:

[M]ere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty-bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country; it was without any historical tradition.^[31]

Trotsky responded to this critique in his History of the Russian Revolution:

When Rosa Luxemburg, in her posthumous polemic against the programme of the October Revolution, asserted that Ukrainian nationalism, having been formerly a mere ‘amusement’ of the commonplace petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, had been artificially raised up by the yeast of the Bolshevik formula of self-determination, she fell, notwithstanding her luminous mind, into a very serious historic error. The Ukrainian peasantry had not made national demands in the past for the reason that the Ukrainian peasantry had not in general risen to the height of political beings. The chief service of the February Revolution – perhaps its only service, but one amply sufficient – lay exactly in this, that it gave the oppressed classes and nations of Russia at last an opportunity to speak out. This political awakening of the peasantry could not have taken place otherwise, however, than through their own native language – with all the consequences ensuing in regard to schools, courts, self-administration. To oppose this would have been to try to drive the peasants back into non-existence.^[32]

If the Bolsheviks had carried out Luxemburg’s policy of “nipping separatist tendencies in the bud with an iron fist”,^[33] to the people of the oppressed nations, they would have appeared as mere continuators of tsarist, Great Russian chauvinism and national oppression. Unity cannot be forced upon an oppressed people. Luxemburg was afraid that the national separatist movements and the Bolshevik policy would lead to the downfall of the revolution. In fact, the exact opposite occurred. The February Revolution politically awakened the masses of the oppressed nations for the first time. The formal equality they achieved during the February Revolution did not satisfy them, and instead it simply underlined the degree of the real, national oppression that they suffered. The provisional government’s rejection of the right to self-determination drove the oppressed nations into revolt against the regime and helped accelerate its downfall. Only by securing the right to self-determination, up to and including separation, did the Bolsheviks win the trust and sympathy of the masses of the oppressed nationalities. And this support was key to securing the Bolshevik victory against the counter-revolution. Rather than leading to a disintegration of the soviet state, it aided its victory in Russia as well as among the oppressed nations.

On the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly

The reformists tend to most frequently use those parts of Rosa Luxemburg’s critique that relate to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the restrictions that the Bolsheviks introduced on democracy.

Luxemburg criticised the Bolsheviks’ assertion that the electoral registers for the Constituent Assembly were out of date, thus rendering them unreflective of the situation in Russia post-October Revolution. In reply, she suggested that the Bolsheviks might have simply called new elections:

But one cannot help wondering how such clever people as Lenin and Trotsky failed to arrive at the conclusion which follows immediately from the above facts. Since the Constituent Assembly was elected long before the decisive turning point, the October Revolution, and its composition reflected the picture of the vanished past and not of the new state of affairs, then it follows automatically that the outgrown and therefore still-born Constituent Assembly should have been annulled, and without delay, new elections to a new Constituent Assembly should have been arranged. They did not want to entrust, nor should they have entrusted, the fate of the revolution to an assemblage which reflected the Kerenskyan^[34] Russia of yesterday, of the period of vacillations and coalition with the bourgeoisie. Hence there was nothing left to do except to convoke an assembly that would issue forth out of the renewed Russia that had advanced further.^[35]

According to Luxemburg, there would have been no problem in electing a Constituent Assembly using outdated registers that were unreflective of the situation in Russia after the revolution. She believed that the pressure of the masses would correct the lopsided composition of the democratic institutions:

According to Trotsky’s theory, every elected assembly reflects once and for all only the mental composition, political maturity and mood of its electorate just at the moment when the latter goes to the polling place. According to that, a democratic body is the reflection of the masses at the end of the electoral period, much as the heavens of Herschel always show us the heavenly bodies not as they are when we are looking at them but as they were at the moment they sent out their light-messages to the earth from the measureless distances of space. Any living mental connection between the representatives, once they have been elected, and the electorate, any permanent interaction between one and the other, is hereby denied.

Yet how all historical experience contradicts this! Experience demonstrates quite the contrary: namely, that the living fluid of the popular mood continuously flows around the representative bodies, penetrates them, guides them. How else would it be possible to witness, as we do at times in every bourgeois parliament, the amusing capers of the ‘people’s representatives’, who are suddenly inspired by a new ‘spirit’ and give forth quite unexpected sounds; or to find the most dried-out mummies at times comporting themselves like youngsters and the most diverse little Scheidemaennchen suddenly finding revolutionary tones in their breasts – whenever there is rumbling in factories and workshops on the street.

And is this ever-living influence of the mood and degree of political ripeness of the masses upon the elected bodies to be renounced in favour of a rigid scheme of party emblems and tickets in the very midst of revolution? Quite the contrary! It is precisely the revolution which creates by its glowing heat that delicate, vibrant, sensitive political atmosphere in which the waves of popular feeling, the pulse of popular life, work for a moment on the representative bodies in the most wonderful fashion. It is on this very fact, to be sure, that the well-known moving scenes depend which invariably present themselves in the first stages of every revolution, scenes in which old reactionaries or extreme moderates, who have issued out of a parliamentary election by limited suffrage under the old regime, suddenly become the heroic and stormy spokesmen of the uprising.^[36]

Luxemburg failed to follow her own logic consistently. In the same article she argued both that only the seizure of power by the soviets offered a way forward, and yet at the same time that the soviets must exist side by side with a Constituent Assembly, that is, alongside a parliamentary assembly. According to Luxemburg, the movement of the masses would exert the necessary pressure on the Assembly, even though its composition was not reflective of the revolutionary mood. It was a rehash of her argument that the pressure of the masses would push the leadership of the SPD to the left. But the pressure of the masses did not solve the problem with the leadership – neither in the workers’ movement, nor in parliament – as Luxemburg herself would come to realise in practice in the course of only a few short months. When the revolution broke out in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg would be posed with the same problems. Under those circumstances, when she was at the centre of a mass movement rather than isolated in a prison cell, she altered her opinion. She came to realise that in practice there is no middle road between bourgeois democracy and workers’ councils. The two cannot exist side by side.

When workers’ and soldiers’ councils were formed in the most important cities of Germany in November 1918 (which we will deal with in greater depth in the next chapter), the leadership of the SPD attempted to derail the revolution and drown out the councils by calling a constituent National Assembly. Luxemburg stood firm and rejected the National Assembly (i.e., Constituent Assembly) as historically outdated. In November 1918 she wrote and published the following words, which indirectly critique the very stance she defended just a couple of months earlier:

The National Assembly is an outmoded legacy of bourgeois revolutions, an empty shell, a requisite from the time of petty-bourgeois illusions of a ‘united people’ and of the ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ of the bourgeois State.

To resort to the National Assembly today is consciously or unconsciously to turn the revolution back to the historical stage of bourgeois revolutions; anyone advocating it is a secret agent of the bourgeoisie or an unconscious spokesman of petty-bourgeois ideology.

The struggle for the National Assembly is carried on under the war-cry of ‘democracy or dictatorship’. Even socialist leaders obediently adopt these slogans of counter-revolutionary demagogues without noticing that this alternative is a demagogic falsification.

Today it is not a question of democracy or dictatorship. The question that history has placed on the agenda is: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy? For the dictatorship of the proletariat is democracy in a socialist sense. It is not a matter of bombs, coups d’état, riots or ‘anarchy’, as the agents of capitalist profit dishonestly make out; rather, it is the use of all the means of political power to realise socialism, to expropriate the capitalist class – in the interests and through the will of the revolutionary majority of the proletariat, that is, in the spirit of socialist democracy.

Without the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat, there can be no socialism. In order to intensify this consciousness, to steel this will, to organise this action, a class organ is necessary: a national council of the urban and rural proletarians.

The convocation of such a representative body of labour in place of the traditional National Assembly of the bourgeois revolutions is in itself an act of the class struggle, a break with the historical past of bourgeois society, a powerful method of arousing the proletarian masses, a first open and abrupt declaration of war against capitalism.

No evasions, no ambiguities – the die must be cast. Yesterday parliamentary cretinism was a weakness; today it is an ambiguity; tomorrow it will be a betrayal of socialism.^[37]

When the question posed itself concretely, Rosa Luxemburg was left in no doubt: the National Assembly (Constituent Assembly) and the councils could not coexist. One power would have to triumph over the other. So, when the reformists of our day attempt to use Luxemburg’s critique of the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in Russia to condemn the supposedly ‘undemocratic’ Bolsheviks, presenting her as an advocate of a parliamentary road to socialism, they can do so only by concealing the fact that she changed her own opinion only a couple of months later.

Restrictions on Democracy and Terror

As well as criticising the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in her article, Luxemburg also criticised the restriction of democratic rights that the Bolsheviks gradually introduced in the course of 1918, including restrictions on the freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, among other things. According to Luxemburg, such a course of action threatened to strangle the political life of the country and thus the revolution itself. The latter, Luxemburg explained, depends upon the full participation of the masses, which itself is predicated on an extensive democracy:

Socialism in life demands a complete spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois rule. Social instincts in place of egotistical ones, mass initiative in place of inertia, idealism which conquers all suffering, etc., etc. No one knows this better, describes it more penetratingly; repeats it more stubbornly than Lenin. But he is completely mistaken in the means he employs. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconian penalties, rule by terror – all these things are but palliatives. The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralises.

When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins^[38] (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!) Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalisation of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc. […]

This is an overpowering objective law from which no party can be exempt.^[39]

She criticised Lenin and Trotsky for introducing the dictatorship of the party in place of the dictatorship of the proletariat:

The basic error of the Lenin–Trotsky theory is that they too, just like Kautsky, oppose dictatorship to democracy. ‘Dictatorship or democracy’ is the way the question is put by Bolsheviks and Kautsky alike. The latter naturally decides in favour of ‘democracy’, that is, of bourgeois democracy, precisely because he opposes it to the alternative of the socialist revolution. Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, decide in favour of dictatorship in contradistinction to democracy, and thereby, in favour of the dictatorship of a handful of persons, that is, in favour of dictatorship on the bourgeois model. They are two opposite poles, both alike being far removed from a genuine socialist policy. The proletariat, when it seizes power, can never follow the good advice of Kautsky, given on the pretext of the ‘unripeness of the country’, the advice being to renounce socialist revolution and devote itself to democracy. It cannot follow this advice without betraying thereby itself, the International, and the revolution. It should and must at once undertake socialist measures in the most energetic, unyielding and unhesitant fashion, in other words, exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique – dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest possible form on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy.^[40]

She continues with remarks that have become iconic for all those wishing to turn her words against Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks:

Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.^[41]

Luxemburg pointed to real problems when she described the emptying of the soviets and the fact that the Bolsheviks were left as the only ruling party. But what was the alternative? To allow the counter-revolution to win? The fact of the matter was that every other party had, one by one, sided with the counter-revolution in the civil war and had taken up arms against the soviet regime. Civil war and hunger had depopulated the cities, and with them the soviets. Ultimately, however, only victory in the civil war could bring the masses once more into activity.

Luxemburg had real concerns, but the manner in which the reformists use them is utterly false. They manipulate her article in order to apparently ‘prove’ that she had prophetically established the ‘inevitable’ connection between the regime of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and the Stalinist dictatorship that came later. But Stalin’s dictatorship had nothing at all to do with the first years of the young Soviet state led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In the wake of the October Revolution, the soviet regime operated democratically. Purely local questions were settled by the local soviets themselves, whilst questions of national and international importance were settled in the central soviet. Here, everyone, including Lenin himself, had to fight to defend their point of view if they wanted to win the majority for their ideas and proposals. Full freedom existed for all of the political parties, with exception of the Black Hundreds – a fascist party responsible for pogroms against Jews and left-wingers. The restrictions introduced by the Bolsheviks limiting democratic rights – including the banning of parties – were the product of the pressure of the civil war. As such, they were regarded as temporary measures that would be lifted once the war ended. Even during the civil war, however, there were lively, democratic discussions and disagreements inside both the Bolshevik Party and the soviets.

The young soviet state and the one-party dictatorship established following Stalin’s rise to power were like oil and water. A bloody chasm separates the two regimes: Stalin exterminated everyone who was in any way connected with the Bolshevik Party during the revolution. The rise of Stalin and the bureaucracy in Russia cannot be traced back to some congenital defect in Leninism and Bolshevism. Rather, it owes its origins to the fact that the Russian Revolution was isolated in a backward country. This was the reason why the revolution degenerated. This was why a bureaucracy could take power. In 1924, it was Stalin who first voiced the counter-revolutionary interests of the rising soviet bureaucracy by formulating the idea of ‘socialism in one country’. From the very beginning, the Bolsheviks on the contrary had maintained that the Russian Revolution must spread to the developed capitalist nations, or else it would perish. This was a perspective that was fully shared by Luxemburg herself:

It is not Russia’s unripeness which has been proved by the events of the war and the Russian Revolution, but the unripeness of the German proletariat for the fulfilment of its historic tasks. And to make this fully clear is the first task of a critical examination of the Russian Revolution.

The fate of the revolution in Russia depended fully upon international events. That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political far-sightedness and firmness of principle and of the bold scope of their policies.^[42]

It was precisely the isolation of the Russian Revolution that gave rise to all the maladies that we’ve discussed. And, indeed, Luxemburg herself explained that in the given circumstances, the tough measures of the Bolsheviks were wholly understandable:

Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class – that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people.

Doubtless the Bolsheviks would have proceeded in this very way were it not that they suffered under the frightful compulsion of the world war, the German occupation and all the abnormal difficulties connected therewith, things which were inevitably bound to distort any socialist policy, however imbued it might be with the best intentions and the finest principles. […]

Let the German Government Socialists cry that the rule of the Bolsheviks in Russia is a distorted expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat. If it was or is such, that is only because it is a product of the behaviour of the German proletariat, in itself a distorted expression of the socialist class struggle. All of us are subject to the laws of history, and it is only internationally that the socialist order of society can be realised.^[43]

The Purpose of the Critique

We have seen how Luxemburg criticised the Bolsheviks for giving the land to the peasants and for carrying the “right of nations to self-determination” into practice. Both points of critique were made out of a fear that the Bolsheviks’ actions would weaken the revolution. On the question of the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Luxemburg changed her opinion, as we have seen. And on the restriction of democratic rights, she was of the opinion that they flowed from “an inevitable chain of causes and effects”. Above everything else, Luxemburg was in favour of the October Revolution. Luxemburg’s critique of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks came from a revolutionary standpoint. She was concerned with understanding how the revolution is spread and its complete victory could be assured.

Warszawski, who had been Luxemburg’s close collaborator in the course of many years in Poland, later published a letter that she had sent towards the end of November 1918 regarding the relationship between the SDKPiL and the Russian Revolution:

If our party [SDKPiL] is full of enthusiasm for Bolshevism and at the same time opposed to the Bolshevik peace of Brest-Litovsk, and also opposes their propagation of national self-determination as a solution, then it is no more than enthusiasm coupled with the spirit of criticism – what more can people want from us?

And she continues:

I shared all your reservations and doubts, but have dropped them in the most important questions, and in others I never went as far as you. Terrorism is evidence of grave internal weakness, but it is directed against internal enemies, who… get support and encouragement from foreign capitalists outside Russia. Once the European revolution comes, the Russian counter-revolutionaries lose not only this support, but – what is more important – they must lose all courage. Bolshevik terror is above all the expression of the weakness of the European proletariat. Naturally the agrarian circumstances there have created the sorest, most dangerous problem of the Russian revolution. But here too the saying is valid – even the greatest revolution can only achieve that which has become ripe [through the development of] social circumstances. This sore too can only be healed through the European revolution. And this is coming.^[44]

Warszawski evaluated Luxemburg’s letter in the following terms:

We have seen the opinions which Rosa Luxemburg stated in her pamphlet were no longer her opinions from November 1918 and until her death. All the same, in spite of the errors and incompletions of her work, it is revolutionary work. Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism differs from opportunistic criticism because it can never harm the cause or the party of revolution, it can only enliven it and help it – because it is revolutionary criticism.^[45]

Rosa Luxemburg was no enemy of Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the Russian Revolution. On the contrary, in the Russian Revolution she was on the same side of the barricades as the Bolsheviks. Any attempt to argue otherwise is utterly dishonest and a complete distortion of her thinking, as Frölich also contends:

Never at any time did she have the intention of launching a campaign against the Bolsheviks. She was always sparing with her hymns of praise, but she never spoke of people or of a party with so much enthusiastic approval as she did of the Bolsheviks in this work. It is a myth, and one which has been sedulously spread by the reformists, to say that she condemned the whole Bolshevik policy, including the October Revolution, and that she rejected the idea of the proletarian dictatorship, and thereby justified the policy of the Mensheviks. Her pamphlet leaves no room for doubt.^[46]

The idea that the revolutionary movement is a monolith, devoid of internal debate and hostile to critique shares nothing with the genuine Marxist tradition and the heritage of Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky. Only later, under Stalinism, did the communist parties take on this character. However, this would certainly pass as an accurate description of the SPD in 1918. By no means coincidentally, Luxemburg was fully convinced that Lenin and Trotsky would receive her critique in a positive manner, and that a critical approach was the only approach by which anything could be learnt from the revolution:

There is no doubt either that the wise heads at the helm of the Russian Revolution, that Lenin and Trotsky on their thorny path beset by traps of all kinds, have taken many a decisive step only with the greatest inner hesitation and with the most violent inner opposition. And surely nothing can be farther from their thoughts than to believe that all the things they have done or left undone under the conditions of bitter compulsion and necessity in the midst of the roaring whirlpool of events, should be regarded by the International as a shining example of socialist policy toward which only uncritical admiration and zealous imitation are in order.

It would be no less wrong to fear that a critical examination of the road so far taken by the Russian Revolution would serve to weaken the respect for and the attractive power of the example of the Russian Revolution, which alone can overcome the fatal inertia of the German masses. Nothing is farther from the truth. An awakening of the revolutionary energy of the working class in Germany can never again be called forth in the spirit of the guardianship methods of the German Social Democracy of late-lamented memory. It can never again be conjured forth by any spotless authority, be it that of our own ‘higher committees’ or that of ‘the Russian example’. Not by the creation of a revolutionary hurrah-spirit, but quite the contrary: only by an insight into all the fearful seriousness, all the complexity of the tasks involved, only as a result of political maturity and independence of spirit, only as a result of a capacity for critical judgement on the part of the masses, whose capacity was systematically killed by the Social-Democracy for decades under various pretexts, only thus can the genuine capacity for historical action be born in the German proletariat. To concern oneself with a critical analysis of the Russian Revolution in all its historical connections is the best training for the German and the international working class for the tasks which confront them as an outgrowth of the present situation.^[47]

According to Luxemburg, it would be utopian to believe that one could make a revolution in which nothing could be criticised, especially in such difficult circumstances as those of Russia in 1917. The purpose of her critique was to make clear that primary responsibility for solving the problems that the Russian Revolution faced rested upon the shoulders of the international proletariat:

Clearly, not uncritical apologetics but penetrating and thoughtful criticism is alone capable of bringing out treasures of experiences and teachings. Dealing as we are with the very first experiment in proletarian dictatorship in world history (and one taking place under the hardest conceivable conditions, in the midst of the world-wide conflagration and chaos of the imperialist mass slaughter, caught in the coils of the most reactionary military power in Europe, and accompanied by the most complete failure on the part of the international working class), it would be a crazy idea to think that every last thing done or left undone in an experiment with the dictatorship of the proletariat under such abnormal conditions represented the very pinnacle of perfection. On the contrary, elementary conceptions of socialist politics and an insight into their historically necessary prerequisites force us to understand that under such fatal conditions even the most gigantic idealism and the most storm-tested revolutionary energy are incapable of realising democracy and socialism but only distorted attempts at either.

To make this stand out clearly in all its fundamental aspects and consequences is the elementary duty of the socialists of all countries; for only on the background of this bitter knowledge can we measure the enormous magnitude of the responsibility of the international proletariat itself for the fate of the Russian Revolution.^[48]

According to Luxemburg, that the Bolsheviks undertook the actions they did was completely understandable. Problems would only arise through uncritical imitation of the Russian Revolution:

The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics. When they get in their own light in this way, and hide their genuine, unquestionable historical service under the bushel of false steps forced on them by necessity, they render a poor service to international socialism for the sake of which they have fought and suffered; for they want to place in its storehouse as new discoveries all the distortions prescribed in Russia by necessity and compulsion – in the last analysis only by-products of the bankruptcy of international socialism in the present world war.^[49]

The sharp formulations that Lenin and the Bolsheviks used to justify the political measures that had been forced upon them evidently made Luxemburg nervous. Lenin himself explained on several occasions how he would tend to take his argument to the limit. In his polemics he would occasionally even go a bit too far to the other extreme in order to hammer home an important point. Luxemburg’s main purpose was to ward off German revolutionaries from attempting to mechanically apply the lessons of the Russian Revolution to German conditions. She hoped to prepare German workers and revolutionaries for the coming revolution by way of her critique:

To concern oneself with a critical analysis of the Russian Revolution in all its historical connections is the best training for the German and the international working class for the tasks which confront them as an outgrowth of the present situation.^[50]

Luxemburg emphasised that blame for the situation in which the Bolsheviks now found themselves lay squarely with the SPD. Measures, which were wholly comprehensible in the circumstances, were forced upon the Bolsheviks because the SPD had betrayed the world socialist revolution and had become a tool of reaction in supporting the imperialist world war. The Bolsheviks were forced into a corner, according to Luxemburg, because the German workers had not yet carried through their own revolution. She was fully in accord with the leading Bolsheviks, who predicted that the latter would not be able to hold onto power for much longer, much less construct socialism, should the revolution in Russia remain isolated. The Russian Revolution had the role of being the spark that would ignite the world revolution. A revolution in the developed capitalist countries, especially in Germany, would save the young Soviet power. Together they could then begin the task of building a new socialist society.

In a letter to Luise Kautsky dated 19 December 1917, Luxemburg wrote from Breslau:

Yes, the Bolsheviks! Of course they don’t please me either with their peace-fanaticism.^[51] But after all – they are not to blame. They are in a straight jacket, and have merely the choice between two beatings and are choosing the lesser. Others are responsible for the fact that the devil profits by the Russian revolution… Therefore let us sweep before our own doors. On the whole events there are glorious and will have incalculable results.^[52]

The Russian Revolution would indeed become the spark that lit a revolutionary conflagration whose flames would spread all the way to Germany. Before long, Luxemburg herself was thrown into the cauldron of revolution. Soon, she would be confronted directly with the problems posed by a revolutionary situation – not from her prison cell armed with nothing other than her pen, but in practice, as she wrote one month earlier expressing her true revolutionary spirit: “I am expecting many other great things during the coming years, only I should prefer to admire history not merely from behind iron bars.”^[53]

Endnotes

[1] Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) – German imperial knight who advocated the dissolution of Germany’s ties with the papacy. In 1520 he published ‘Arouser of the German Nation’, which opens with his motto, “I have dared to do it”, in which announced his support of Martin Luther.

[2] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 395.

[3] Petrograd – the most important city in Russia during 1917. Until 1914, the city was named St. Petersburg, but was renamed to do away with the apparent German-sounding name. In this chapter I have decided to use the name Petrograd as this was the name of the city during the events which we examine. The city was renamed to Leningrad in 1924, and re-renamed St. Petersburg in 1991.

[4] By August 1917, Trotsky had been working closely with the Bolsheviks for months. However, in agreement with Lenin, he remained outside the party in order to win over the entire membership of the Mezhraiontsy (the ‘Interdistrict’ group, an organisation to which he and a couple of thousand others belonged) to the Bolsheviks. He was successful, and the whole group fused with the Bolsheviks in August 1917.

[5] The first All-Russian Congress of Soviets was convened in Petrograd between 16 June and 7 July. In spite of the mood in Petrograd shifting dramatically in favour of the Bolsheviks, culminating in the movement of the ‘July Days’, the composition of the All-Russia congress still reflected a clear majority in support of the provisional government and the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties. Bolshevik resolutions for the Soviets to assume power and end the war were voted down in favour of support for the socialist ministers in the government and the continuation of the war without annexations. It elected an All-Russian Central Executive Committee with the Menshevik Chkheidze as president.

[6] This section is based on ‘Den nye sovjetmagt og borgerkrig – hvad der virkelig skete’ (‘The New Soviet Power and the Civil War: What really happened’) written by Jonas Foldager in Den Russiske Revolution og Borgerkrig – da arbejderne tog magten (The Russian Revolution and Civil War – When the Workers Seized Power). A more detailed examination of the first year of the revolution is given in this text.

[7] See V. Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, pp. 138-9.

[8] The Czechoslovak Legion was part of the Tsarist army. It was composed of Czech and Slovak volunteers enrolling to fight against Austria-Hungary. Their demobilisation from the Ukrainian front was agreed with the Soviet authorities in February 1918, but it was cut across by the German offensive, prior to the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The Legion’s retreat towards the Urals converted its very existence into a complicating factor in the extremely chaotic situation of the Civil War, which led the Legion to link up with the White armies. The fall of Austria-Hungary in November 1918 and the proclamation of Czechoslovak independence prompted the Legion to open negotiations with the Red Army to seek further retreat and evacuation by sea via Vladivostok. This was completed in September 1920.

[9] R. Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg [2013], p. 466.

[10] Alexey Kaledin (1861-1918) – leader of the Don Cossacks and active in the Kornilov coup. Participated in the formation of the counter-revolutionary White armies at the beginning of the civil war. Shot himself in January 1918.

[11] Fyodor Ilyich Dan (1871-1947) – Menshevik, member of the Presidium of the Petrograd soviet prior to the October Revolution.

[12] Irakli Tsereteli (1881-1959) – Menshevik, after the February Revolution a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd soviet. From May 1917 minister in the provisional government.

[13] Jean-Paul Marat (1743-93) – Jacobin, active during the French Revolution (note by Frölich).

[14] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, pp. 372-5.

[15] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 698.

[16] There are a lot of myths concerning this article and different representations of Luxemburg’s purpose in writing it. Before Luxemburg wrote ‘The Russian Revolution’ she had, in September 1918, written a shorter article, ‘The Russian Tragedy’, which criticised the Bolshevik acceptance of the Brest-Litovsk peace with Germany and its consequences. According to Nettl, she wrote another critical article which the editors of the Spartacus Letters refused to print out of concern that Luxemburg’s criticism could be used to undermine the Bolsheviks. After this, Paul Levi visited Rosa Luxemburg in prison and convinced her not to publish the long article which she planned to write. According to Nettl, this was the first time in a decade that Luxemburg had been convinced not to print something she had written. According to Frölich, Luxemburg did not write the article for publication but in order to “convince her comrades and for her own understanding”. Exactly how and why the article was written, we will probably never know, but the more important question is its political content.

[17] During the summer of 1917, Rosa Luxemburg had been moved from Wronke to Breslau prison, where conditions were much harsher. She was dependent on the newspapers for information on the events in Russia, and the government had worked out strict instructions for the press regarding its reporting on Russia. With regards to the October Revolution, the order was: “all that explains or praises the proceedings of the revolutionaries in Russia must be suppressed.” (Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 680.)

[18] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 394.

[19] Ibid., p. 395.

[20] Ibid., p. 375.

[21] Ibid., p. 376.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., p. 377.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid., p. 378.

[26] Quoted in L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3, pp. 1174-5 (my emphasis – MF).

[27] Ibid., pp. 1176-7.

[28] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 379.

[29] R. Luxemburg, Zur russischen Revolution, Chapter 3, Marxist Internet Archive [Website], our translation.

[30] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 380.

[31] Ibid., p. 382.

[32] L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3, p. 898.

[33] R. Luxemburg, Zur russischen Revolution, Chapter 3, Marxist Internet Archive [Website].

[34] Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970) – Socialist Revolutionary who became Minister of Justice after the February Revolution, then Minister of War, and finally Prime Minister of the Provisional Government and supreme commander of the Russian military. Fought against the soviet regime after the October Revolution.

[35] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 385.

[36] Ibid., pp. 385-6. From here on, Luxemburg gives examples from the classic bourgeois revolutions, beginning with the English: “The classic example is provided by the famous ‘Long Parliament’ in England, which was elected and assembled 1642 and remained at its post for seven whole years and reflected in its internal life all alterations and displacements of popular feeling, of political ripeness, of class differentiation, of the progress of the revolution to its highest point, from the initial devout skirmishes with the Crown under a Speaker who remains on his knees, to the abolition of the House of Lords, the execution of Charles and the proclamation of the republic.”

[37] R. Luxemburg, ‘The National Assembly’, Marxist Internet Archive [Website].

[38] This is a reference to the period in which the Jacobins, the most radical wing in the French Revolution, held power in 1793-94.

[39] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, pp. 391-3

[40] Ibid., p. 393.

[41] Ibid., pp. 389-90.

[42] Ibid., p. 368.

[43] Ibid., pp. 394-5.

[44] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg., pp. 716-7 (additions are made by Nettl).

[45] Quoted ibid., p. 717.

[46] P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 211.

[47] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, pp. 369-70.

[48] Ibid., pp. 368-9.

[49] Ibid., pp. 394-5.

[50] Ibid., p. 370.

[51] Luxemburg probably refers to the armistice between Russia and the Central Powers concluded on 15 December, which would lead to the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk.

[52] R. Luxemburg, Letters to Karl and Luise Kautsky from 1896 to 1918, pp. 214-5.

[53] Ibid., p. 207.