Editorial Foreword
* Volumes I and II of the Complete Works consisted of her writings on economics and were published in 2013 and 2015, respectively. A third volume of economic writings, largely consisting of manuscripts that have only recently come to light, will be issued within the next several years.
Introduction
* V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), p. 210.
† For a more systematic discussion of the complexities of the relationship between Lenin and Luxemburg, see Paul Le Blanc, “Luxemburg and Lenin Through Each Other’s Eyes,” in Unfinished Leninism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2014), pp. 129–38. See also Ottokar Luban, “Rosa Luxemburg’s Criticism of Lenin’s Ultra Centralist Party Concept and of the Bolshevik Revolution,” in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 4 (3), August 2012, pp. 345–65.
* See Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, Band 6: 1893 bis 1906, edited by Annelies Laschitza and Eckhard Müller (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2014).
† See Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, Baende 7.1, 7.2, 1907 bis 1919, edited by Annelies Laschitza and Eckhard Müller (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2017).
‡ Politt has edited a German translation of some of these writings in Rosa Luxemburg, Arbeiterrevolution 1905/06: Polnische Texte (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2015). He is currently working on a German translation of many of her other Polish writings, which will appear as a supplementary Vol. 8 to the Gesammelte Werke.
* This work would not be possible without the aid and assistance of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin as well as Dietz Verlag. It would also not be possible without the support of many individuals who have contributed financially to the fund established to help defray the cost of translations, The Toledo Fund (although the Luxemburg Foundation is providing some support for translation costs, they cannot cover all of it). Those who wish to contribute to the fund can do so via: toledo.nationbuilder.com/complete_works_rosa_luxemburg.
† See The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I: Economic Writings 1, edited by Peter Hudis (London and New York: Verso Books, 2013).
‡ See The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II: Economic Writings 2, edited by Peter Hudis and Paul Le Blanc (London and New York: Verso Books, 2015).
§ Mehring, a close colleague and friend of Luxemburg, asked her to write the chapters on Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital because of his lack of facility in economics. The English editions of his Karl Marx do not mention that Luxemburg wrote the chapters.
* See Mark L. Thomas, “Review of the Letters of Rosa Luxemburg,” Socialist Review, March 2011.
† See Peter Hudis, “The Multi-dimensionality of Rosa Luxemburg: Perspectives, Challenges, and Ramifications of issuing The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg,” paper presented to the conference Red Biography: Communist Life Histories in Global Perspective, Bloomington, Indiana, February 2017.
‡ Holger Politt, Rosa Luxemburg, Arbeiterrevolution 1905/1906: Polnische Texte, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2015), p. 9.
* Ian D. Thatcher, “Leon Trotsky and 1905,” in The Russian Revolution of 1905: Centenary Perspectives, edited by Jonathan D. Smele and Anthony Heywood (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 236.
† Harrison E. Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow: Russia’s Revolutions 1905–1917 (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1981), p. 117.
* For a good overview on the Revolution of 1905, see Sidney Harcave, The Russian Revolution, (London; Collier Books, 1970); Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, Volumes 1 and 2: (Stanford University Press, 1988 and 1994); Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: A Short History, (Stanford University Press, 2004). In addition: The Russian Revolution of 1905: Centenary Perspectives, (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); The Russian Revolution of 1905 in Transcultural Perspective: Identities, Peripheries, and the Flow of Ideas, (Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2013), as well as Volume 1 of J. P. Nettl’s two-volume biography of Rosa Luxemburg, (London; Oxford University Press, 1966).
* Politt, Rosa Luxemburg, Arbeiterrevolution 1905/1906: Polnische Texte, pp. 9–10.
† This was not in itself unique to the SDKPiL, however; the PPS largely held to the same view up to 1906, and the PPS-Left (which split from the former in that year) upheld it throughout its existence.
* Eric Blanc, “The Rosa Luxemburg Myth: A Critique of Luxemburg’s Politics in Poland (1893–1919) Historical Materialism Online (2018). Accessed at: booksandjournals.brillonline.com.
† Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 8.
* Ibid.
* Letter to Henrietta Roland-Holst, December 17, 1904, in The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza (London and New York: Verso Books, 2011), p. 183.
† Letter to Henrietta Roland-Holst, July 3, 1905, in The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 187.
‡ See this volume, p. 51, below.
* See this volume, p. 53, below.
† See this volume, p. 54, below.
‡ See this volume, p. 58, below.
* See The Russian Revolution, in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Books, 2004), p. 307.
† Ibid., p. 305.
Social Democratic Movement in the Lithuanian Provinces of Russia
* This article first appeared anonymously in the SPD newspaper Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers Paper of Saxony), No. 222, September 25, 1897. The main title in German is “Sozialdemokratische Bewegung in den litauischen Gouvernments Russlands.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works), Vol. 6 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2014), pp. 111–13. Unless indicated otherwise, italics are by Luxemburg. We have used the current spelling “Vilnius” for the main city in Lithuania, which in Luxemburg’s time was called “Vilna.” In German, it was previously called “Wilna” and in Polish “Wilno,” but the official Russian name was “Vilna” at the time this article was written.
† Luxemburg uses this French phrase meaning “his good offices, and those not so good.”
‡ Leo Jogiches had been involved in organizing a strike at Ryfkin several years earlier.
* Although the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania (Lietuvos Socialdemokratų Partija, or LSDP) was not formed until 1896 (a year before Luxemburg wrote this article), Jewish, Polish, and ethnic Lithuanians had been active in promoting Marxist ideas in the area for a number of years previously. Most of the Jewish activists viewed themselves as Russian Marxists, whereas many Polish and ethnic Lithuanians identified with the national aspirations of their respective communities. Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg’s close colleague, was one of the leaders of the LSDP.
† This is a reference to what became known as the “circle spirit” that predominated among activists in the Russian Empire prior to the emergence of large-scale political parties focused on public agitation. For some of the debates within the Russian movement over the need to break out of such self-enclosed study circles, see V. I. Lenin, “To the Party Membership,” Collected Works, Vol. 7 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), pp. 140–4.
‡ Kannegiesserei is literally spoutings, outpourings, or effusions from a beer mug.
§ This refers to the strike that began in June 1896, and which involved 30,000 textile workers.
¶ The LSDP was founded as an underground Marxist party at a congress in Vilnius in 1896. The party was virtually wiped out by 1900 due to arrests and severe repression, which led some of its founding members (such as Felix Dzierżyński) to join Luxemburg’s Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SKDPiL).
* Known as St. Petersburg at the time, the city is almost always referred to as Petersburg by Luxemburg in these writings.
† At the time Luxemburg was writing this piece and all others in this volume, “Social Democracy” referred to the orthodox Marxism of the Second International, which proclaimed the need for the revolutionary transformation of society—even though many associated with Social Democracy were committed more to social reform than revolution. For Luxemburg, however, “Social Democracy” meant a commitment to what she considered to be genuine Marxism. Her nomenclature was to change only after the Second International capitulated to national chauvinism at the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
* In fact, at the time of the writing of this article groups such as the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which supported national independence for Poland, had significantly larger and more extensive roots in the working class than Luxemburg’s Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP)—not to be confused with the SDKPiL, founded in 1900.
† The Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung was founded in 1889 as the main newspaper of the Austrian Social Democrats. Victor Adler was its first editor, from 1889 to 1894.
A Workers Newspaper in Russia
* The German title of this piece is “Ein Arbeiterblatt in Russland.” It first appeared in Leipziger Volkszeitung (Workers Paper of Leipzig), No. 15, January 19, 1899. It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 253–4. The letter “L” was placed at the beginning of this item, implying “Brief Note by L.” In a letter to Jogiches of January 14, 1899, Luxemburg reported that she had received “a new, popularized Marxist newspaper” from a Russian émigré, a woman named Shirman, “which will appear legally in Russia, apparently not under the aegis of the clique of Plekh[anov]-Struve etc.” (at the time Luxemburg and Jogiches were not on good terms with Plekhanov, then the leading figure of Russian Marxism). She said that the impression the newspaper made on her caused her to feel “sympathetic” toward it, but it also seemed “a bit unfinished.” She also said she would no longer sign her “Brief Notices” with “RL.” See Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Briefe (Collected Letters), Vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1989), p. 252.
† This should not be confused with a much later Russian literary journal under the same name, which began publication in 1931.
‡ This refers to supporters of the People’s Will organization (Narodnaya Volya), which advocated revolutionary violence as part of sparking a socialist revolution based on the Russian peasantry.
§ This manifesto was issued at an international conference on questions of the maintenance of peace that was called by the Russian government and held in St. Petersburg on August 12, 1898. The conference was aimed at tamping down rivalries between various European powers and Russia, which felt itself in an increasingly vulnerable position.
¶ Labriola’s Essays on the Materialist Theory of History (New York: Cosimo, 2005) was first published in Italian as Del materialismo storico (Rome: Loescher, 1899).
** This is a reference to Webb’s pamphlet Labor in the Longest Reign (1837–97) (London: Fabian Society, 1897).
* By the term “Empress,” Luxemburg is probably referring to the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, the widow of Tsar Alexander II (and mother of Nicholas II). She was well known for her activity in charity work, unlike Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, wife of Nicholas II.
† This so-called philanthropic journal was published from 1897 to 1918.
A New Tsarist Circular
* Although this article, “Ein neues zaristisches Rundschreiben,” was unsigned, Luxemburg was its author. It first appeared in Leipziger Volkszeitung, No. 20 and 25, January 25, 1899. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 255–60. The piece is closely connected to her article “Russia in the Year 1898” of January 18 and 20, 1899 (see Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1 [Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2007], pp. 318–25), in which she wrote: “It says a lot about tsarism’s transformed international role in the years since the Holy Alliance, that while Russia is a participating guest at a West European Anti-Anarchist Conference on the River Tiber [on November 24, 1898 in Rome], it itself invites European governments to a Disarmament Comedy in Petersburg.” Explaining her reasons for submitting her piece to Leipziger Volkszeitung, she wrote to Leo Jogiches on December 31, 1898: “I don’t feel so at home in Die Neue Zeit as I am in the Leipziger Volkszeitung, where I can write what and how much I want, lashing out if the situation demands it, as is apparently necessary in polemics” (see Luxemburg’s, Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 1, p. 242). Bruno Schönlank had asked her to write about Russia in December 1898 as part of continuing her polemic against Eduard Bernstein. Other leading figures in the German movement also commented on the tsar’s disarmament manifesto, such as Franz Mehring in “Thunder Clouds” (Die Neue Zeit, Vol. 16. 1897/1898, Vol. 2, pp. 737ff.) and Karl Kautsky in “Democratic and Reactionary Disarmament,” (ibid., p. 740) and “A Russian Diplomatic Trick” (in Vorwärts, No. 202, August 30, 1898). Luxemburg’s article characteristically focuses on broader issues of the international dangers and entanglements that result from imperialism, expansionist politics and Weltpolitik.
† At the time Luxemburg was writing, Russia still used the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar (which was used in much of the rest of Europe). Russia adopted the latter (widely known as the “new style”) in 1918, after the 1917 Revolution. The old style is the first date given, the new style the second.
* The Geneva Convention of August 22, 1864, entitled “Concerning the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field,” originated from the humanitarian work of Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman who witnessed the bloody Battle of Solferino on June 24, 1859, during the Second Italian War of Independence. Shocked by the carnage, in which 23,000 were killed or wounded in a single day, he organized the civilian populace to care for the injured and published a book about his experiences, Un Souvenir de Solferino (A Memory of Solferino) in 1862. It included proposals for establishing voluntary aid agencies that could treat the wounded and sick in wars. This helped lead to the Geneva Convention of 1864, signed by twelve states (Baden, Belgium, Denmark, France, Hesse, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, Switzerland, Spain and Württemberg). It formulated ten articles for aiding wounded soldiers and protecting aid agencies engaged in their treatment, and also adopted a flag with a red cross on a white background as a symbol of protection—the forerunner of the Red Cross, which was formed a year later. The Geneva Convention was the first international treaty stipulating rules of warfare. In the years that followed, additional countries acceded to the Convention, such as Norway and Sweden in December 1864, Great Britain in 1865, Austria in 1866, Russia in 1867, and the U.S. in 1882. In 1868, a proposal was made to extend the convention’s application to cover naval war. Although fifteen states signed this additional article, no country ratified it and the proposal failed to be adopted due to lack of support.
* The Brussels Conference took place between July 27 and August 27, 1874, with representatives from fifteen European states, with the aim of adopting an international treaty concerning the laws and the methods of war. Russian Tsar Alexander II initiated this process. However, the motions adopted by the conference as formulated in the “Declaration Concerning the Laws and Methods of Warfare” never achieved the status of a binding international law treaty, because they, too, were not ratified. They nevertheless formed the basis for the Hague Peace Conference in 1899 and the Hague Convention, which was adopted in 1907.
* Baron Max Freiherr von Thielmann, Secretary of State for the Imperial Treasury, introduced proposals to parliament for restructuring the German armed forces on December 12, 1898, and defended them in relation to the draft of the Imperial Budget for 1899. He proposed to increase the number of noncommissioned officers and soldiers in small military units by a total of 26,576, to retain the two-year period of military service until 1904, and to increase the size of the artillery and the cavalry corp. See the stenographic reports of the Reichstag debates in Verhandlungen des Reichstags. X. Legislaturperiode. I. Session 1898/1900, Vol. 1 (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1899), p. 19. For the speech of Heinrich von Goßler, Prussian war minister, see p. 186.
* This phrase (“Grattez le Russe, et vous verrez un Tartare”) has long been attributed to Napolean Bonaparte, but its use may well precede him. It was made famous by Marquis de Custine, who traveled to Russia in 1839 and wrote a highly critical study of its social structure and political system in his book Le Russie en 1839 (Russia in 1839) (Brussels: Wouters & Co., 1843).
† Weltpolitik was the foreign policy pursued by Germany from 1891, which emphasized the need for colonial expansion, the assertion of German power on a global level, and increased competition with other European imperialist powers. It is often contrasted with Realpolitik, the earlier effort of Bismarck to emphasize a balance of power between competing capitalist states.
Russian Women Workers in Battle
* This article, “Russische Arbeiterinnen im Kampfe,” is not signed but was written by Luxemburg. She discussed writing it in a letter of March 1902 to Clara Zetkin, editor of Die Gleichheit, the paper of the SPD’s women section. Luxemburg was unsure whether it would meet Zetkin’s expectations, and excuses the length and the “emotionality” of the article (see Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 1, p. 632). It was published in Die Gleichheit, Year 12, No. 9 and 23, April 23, 1902. Gleichheit (Equality) was a bimonthly that began publication in Stuttgart in 1891; it bore the subhead Zeitschrift für die Interessen der Arbeiterinnen (Journal Published in the Interests of Working Women). It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 388–91.
* Iskra, founded in 1900, was the official publication of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. We use the Russian initials, RSDRP, for the name of the party—Rossiyskaya Sotsial-Demokraticheskaya Rabochaya Partiya. Iskra was initially edited by Lenin and published in Leipzig, and then in Geneva and London. By 1903 it had fallen under the control of the Menshevik faction of the RSDRP.
* The Okhrana was the secret police of the tsarist government. Its official title was “Petersburg Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order.”
† The Nevsky Prospect, Petersburg’s main thoroughfare.
‡ [Footnote by Luxemburg] This statement relates to the disputes between the Russian Social Democrats and other revolutionaries from the intelligentsia. In contrast, the May Day demonstration in Petersburg was marked by the almost exclusive participation of proletarians, who appeared in tightly knit groups on the Nevsky.
* An ironic reference to Tsar Nicholas II, often used by Luxemburg in her writings.
The Russian Terrorist Trial
* This article, “Der russische Terroristen-Prozeß,” was not signed. However, it is clear from Luxemburg’s letter to Kurt Eisner on April 27, 1904 that she is the author (see Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, p. 56). It was published in Vorwärts (Berlin), the SPD’s central party newspaper, No. 91, April 10, 1904. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 494–8.
† After helping to form the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1901, Gershuni founded the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization in 1902 with the aim of assassinating tsarist officials. In that year, he planned the assassination of Dimitry Sipyagin, Minister of the Interior, and Nicholas Bogdanovich, Governor of Ufa. His effort to assassinate Obolensky was a failure. In 1908 (following Gershuni’s death), the Combat Organization was disbanded. For more on Gershuni, see Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov, Grigori Gershuni: Zayn lebn un tetikayt (His Life and Activities) (New York: Institute of Jewish Education, 1934) and Gershuni’s memoir, Iz nedavniago proshlago (From the Recent Past) (St. Petersburg, 1907).
‡ Gershuni’s birthname was Gersh Isakov-Itskov Gershuni; of Jewish origin, he later Russified it to Grigori Andreyevich Gershuni.
§ All of these individuals were members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Combat Organization.
* The Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), formed in 1901–1902, represented the interests of the peasantry and aimed at overthrowing tsarism and establishing a democratic republic. Terrorist attacks were one medium they used to further their political struggle. At the time of the 1917 Revolution they were the largest socialist group in Russia and were split into left-wing and right-wing factions. The Left-SR officially became an independent organization by the time of the October 1917 Revolution.
† A member of the armed forces responsible for internal security.
* Under the reforms of governing the church made by Peter I, the position of Patriarch of the Synod was abolished and a church layman headed the institution instead.
* On January 24, 1878, Zasulich, then a member of the People’s Will organization, attempted to assassinate Colonel Fyodor Trepov, Governor of St. Petersburg. He was widely hated for helping to suppress the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863 and for his extreme brutality. Trepov survived the attempt, and Zasulich was later found not guilty at her trial. It marked a turning point in the development of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire.
† The Hereros are an African people living in what was then known by Europeans as South West Africa; today it is Namibia. German colonists began entering their territory in 1892 and a genocidal conflict began almost at once. German reprisals against Herero resistance were brutal, resulting in the near genocidal destruction of their society. It is estimated that of the 100,000 Herero people living at the time of contact, the German army may have killed 85,000.
Amid the Storm
* This article first appeared in French, in the newspaper of the Socialist Party of France (led by Jules Guesde), Le Socialiste, No. 81, May 1–8, 1904. Its title in French was “Dans la Tempête.” It was signed by Luxemburg on behalf of the SDKPiL. It is translated (by George Shriver) from the German version in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 499–500.
† The reference is to the Russo-Japanese war, which began in January 1904 and ended by a peace settlement in September 1905, negotiated at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, under the auspices of President Theodore Roosevelt. Since the U.S. also had its eyes on China, it had an interest in limiting both Japan and Russia in their competing drive into Manchuria, Korea, and northeast China.
‡ The Dual Alliance consisted of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires; the Triple Alliance consisted of the French, Russian, and British empires.
§ That is, since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871.
¶ Many of the views of which Luxemburg is critical were expressed at the 1900 Paris Conference of the Second International, where some of the delegates refrained from taking a firm stand against European colonialism.
** That is, the competition for colonial possessions and “spheres of influence.”
* This statement is a prescient anticipation of the way in which the Russo-Japanese War led to the revolution that erupted in Russia eight months after the publication of this article.
Political Breakthrough
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from the Polish original as it appeared in the December 1904 issue of Czerwony Sztandar, No. 22, pp. 1–2. The Polish title is “Przełom polityczny.” It serves as an introduction to the Proclamation by the Chief Executive Committee of the SDKPiL, “Onward to Storm the Autocracy!” (“Do szturmu na samowładztwo!”). The latter is in the same issue of Czerwony Sztandar (pp. 2–3) and immediately follows this article, below. Luxemburg frequently refers to “our country” (nasz kraj), by which she means Poland, and to “the state” (państwo), by which she means the tsarist empire as a whole.
† The zemstvos were a rural administrative body in tsarist Russia. Tsar Alexander II established them after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. They were in charge of such local matters as roads, elementary schools, medical facilities, etc. Liberals among the landowning aristocracy generally dominated the zemstvos over time. The Zemstvo Congress that Luxemburg mentions took place November 19–22, 1904 (November 6–9, old style). This congress was originally supposed to be held in Moscow, but was then relocated to Petersburg after the government promised it would permit it. The government did not keep its promise, but nevertheless the Congress was able to meet in private homes under police surveillance and was able to draft a proposal, which was submitted to the government. That proposal called for civil liberties and, above all, for an “independent elective institution” in which “representatives of the people would take their proper part in the exercise of legislative power.” A minority of those attending the Congress stated that they would be satisfied with “representatives of the people” merely taking part in “the making of laws” rather than “in the exercise of legislative power.” The proposal submitted to the tsarist government was known as the “Eleven Theses of the First Zemstvo Congress, November 1904.” See Sidney Harcave, The Russian Revolution of 1905 (London: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 55–7 and 279–81. The quotes are from Harcave’s translation of the majority and minority positions at the Zemstvo Congress. Neither side at the Congress used the terms “parliament” or “constitution,” but contented themselves with referring to “an independent elective institution.” At the beginning of December 1904, in the name of the SDKPiL, Jogiches addressed a letter to the Party Council of the RSDRP in which he called on that body to take the initiative in view of the emerging political situation to bring about agreement for joint action among the various Social Democratic organizations in the tsarist empire. See Archiwum ruchu robotniczego (Archive of the Workers Movement), Vol. 5 (Warsaw: Ksiażka i Wiedza, 1977), pp. 118ff.
‡ This refers to Russian Interior Minister Pyotr Danilovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky.
* Knout—a whip used in imperial Russia, made of rawhide and often with metal hooks attached, which could cause serious injury or death. In her writings of this period Luxemburg constantly referred to the tsarist regime as “the rule of the knout.”
† “Away with all of you, you stinking dogs!” The boyars were Russian noblemen that Ivan the Terrible worked to bring completely under his control.
* In her text, Luxemburg gave the Polish transliteration of this Russian language exclamation attributed to the sixteenth-century Muscovite Tsar Ivan IV (“the Terrible”).
† See Marx’s “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 20 (New York: International Publishers, 1985), p. 13.
* That is, the whole tsarist empire.
† That is, Poland.
Proclamation of the SDKPiL Chief Executive Committee of December 1904: Onward to Storm the Autocracy
* This proclamation was also printed by the SDKPiL as a leaflet in an extra-large print run of 9,000 and distributed in industrial centers, such as Warsaw, Łódź, and Częstochowa in December 1904. It was signed by the Chief Executive Committee of the SDKPiL. It is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from Czerwony Sztandar, No. 22, December 1904, pp. 3–4.
The Russian Year
* This article first appeared anonymously in the main SPD newspaper, Vorwärts, No. 1, January 1, 1905. The title in German is “Das russische Jahr.” Luxemburg’s authorship is indicated by the Rosa Luxemburg Bibliography of Feliks Tych, which lists this as No. 308. See “Bibliografia pierwodruków Róży Luksemburg,” in Z Pola Walki, 1962, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 161–226. The article is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 501–5.
† This is a reminder for readers of the International Socialist Congress, which was held in Amsterdam from August 14–20, 1904, and which among other things declared its sympathy with the fighting proletariat of Russia.
‡ That is, in the fight of the Greeks against Turkish domination in the early nineteenth century.
§ See especially Marx’s “On the Polish Question: Speeches in Brussels on February 22, 1848, on the Occasion of the Second Anniversary of the Cracow Insurrection,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), pp. 544–9.
* These lines are from Franz Grillparzer’s poem “Warsaw” (emphasis added by Luxemburg). See Grillparzer’s Sämtliche Werke (Complete Works), Vol. 1 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1960), pp. 200ff.
† This refers to the brutal military campaign by German colonial troops against the Herero people in Southwest Africa, who rebelled in January of 1904 against the draconian colonial policies being pursued by Germany. The Herero rebellion was joined by the Khoikoi (termed by Europeans as “Hottentots” at the time) in October of 1904.
‡ In the trial of July 1, 1904 against the directors of a Berlin mortgage bank, it was established that by means of false assertions Baron von Mirbach, Lord High Steward to the Empress, had withdrawn from the Empress’s account 350,000 marks for the building of churches, but only 25,000 had been spent. In this way, he was supporting the bank by maintaining unspent reserves. In addition, he demanded in a circular letter to his subordinates in the administration that funds be collected for church building among government officials, and he promised to award orders and titles in exchange for monetary contributions. On September 1, 1904, von Mirbach was dismissed from service as the administrator of the private purse of the Empress.
§ The reference is to the debates in the Prussian House of Lords on May 11 and 13, 1904, about a memorandum from the conservative political leaders Count Mirbach and Baron Otto Karl Gottlieb von Manteufel. In that memorandum, they called for a change in the law governing elections to the Reichstag, and also demanded exceptional laws against Social Democracy. Their demands were rejected by Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow.
¶ Von Mirbach, a German diplomat, served in various positions overseas, including in Russia before and after the 1905 Revolution.
* A reference to Karl von Einem.
* This refers to the First Party Congress of the SPD of Prussia, held on December 28–31, 1904, in Berlin. It passed a resolution demanding universal, direct, and equal suffrage by secret ballot for all citizens over the age of twenty.
The Uprising of the Petersburg Proletariat
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from the January 1905 issue of Czerwony Sztandar (Red Flag), No. 23, pp. 1–2. The title in Polish is “Powstanie petersburskiego proletariatu.”
† The name of this official Russian publication when translated into Polish was Goniec Rządowy.
‡ This organization was called the Assembly of Russian Factory and Plant Workers of St. Petersburg (in Russian, Sobranie Russkikh Fabrichno-Zavodskikh Rabochikh Sankt-Peterburga). It had about 9,000 members and a following of perhaps 100,000—more than half of the factory workers in the city.
§ By the end of 1904, the Assembly had about 8,000 members. Gapon and his collaborators in this Assembly, influenced by some socialist workers who joined the organization, initiated the mass demonstration in St. Petersburg on Sunday, January 22, 1905. Although the aim was merely to petition the tsar, this event went down in history as “Bloody Sunday” when the tsar’s troops and police fired on the workers, killing about 2,000 of them.
* At this point Luxemburg presents in Polish translation lengthy excerpts from the text of the petition that the workers attempted to deliver to the Winter Palace. These excerpts take up about half a column of her article of roughly three columns in the January 1905 issue of Czerwony Sztandar. For these excerpts, we have used the wording from a full English translation of the Gapon petition, which is included below, after this article. This English version comes from Sidney Harcave, The Russian Revolution of 1905, pp. 285–9. Aside from the version in Harcave’s book, another version with more old-fashioned English wording is in the public domain as an Appendix to Gapon’s autobiography, The Story of My Life (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905). In this part of Luxemburg’s Polish text to German readers, a German translation of Gapon’s petition, from the Vienna Social Democratic newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung of January 22, 1905, was used.
* In the passage above Luxemburg’s Polish version alters somewhat the original text of Gapon’s petition.
† Luxemburg, in her Polish version, shortened this last passage somewhat, as indicated by the elliptical dots.
* See Luxemburg’s essay “Nacjonalizm a socjaldemokracja rosyjska i polska: 1. Socjalpatriotyczna robinsonada” (Nationalism and Social Democracy, Russian and Polish: 1. The Social Patriotic Robinson-Crusoe Cavalcade), in Przegląd Socjaldemokratyczny (Social Democratic Review, theoretical magazine of the SDKPiL), No. 10, October 1903, pp. 366–83, in which she wrote: “The entire minimum program of today’s Social Democracy in all countries is nothing more than the political formulation of the most far-reaching and most pressing tendencies toward progress in the capitalist era.”
* Known at the time as Libau, a town in what is now Latvia.
† In Baku, in December 1904, after an eighteen-day general strike in which as many as 50,000 workers took part, a collective bargaining agreement was concluded for the first time in the history of tsarist Russia, according to which the nine-hour day was established for most workers in the oil industry, and under certain conditions, a workday of eight hours was agreed to.
‡ In her 1906 Mass Strike, Party, and Unions, Luxemburg described the tie between Baku and Petersburg this way: “But the Petersburg rising of January 22 was only the climactic moment of a mass strike which the proletariat of the tsarist capital had begun earlier in January 1905. That January mass strike [in Petersburg] was without doubt carried through under the immediate influence of the gigantic general strike which in December 1904 broke out in the Caucasus, in Baku, and for a long time had all of Russia holding its breath in suspense. The events of December [1904] in Baku were in turn only the last and powerful offshoot of those tremendous mass strikes that, like a powerful earthquake, had shaken the whole of south Russia [in 1902–1903] and whose prologue was the mass strike in Batum in the Caucasus in March 1902.” She goes on to give a detailed account of that series of strikes in 1902–1903. See The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. IV: Political Writings 2 (forthcoming).
* For the original of this document, see Akademiya Nauk, SSSR, Institut Istorii, Nachalo Pervoi Russkoi Revolyutsii (Beginning of the First Russian Revolution), (Moscow: Akademiya Nauk, Institut Istorii, 1955), pp. 28–31.
After the First Act
* This article was first published in Neue Zeit, 1904–1905, Vol. 1, pp. 610–14, under the title, “Nach dem ersten Akt.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 485–90.
† Then known as Mitau, in Latvia.
‡ In addition to “thoroughness,” the German word Gründlichkeit can also be translated as “profundity” or “solidity” (that is, “a solidly grounded quality; groundedness”). Luxemburg’s wording was as follows: Und mit der Masse, die in Aktion tritt, wächst, um mit Marx zu reden, auch “die Gründlichkeit” der Masse, deren Aktion sie ist.
* Divide and conquer.
† Because of his participation in the struggle of the revolutionary proletariat, Maxim Gorky had already been subjected to repression by the tsarist authorities. After the workers’ demonstration in St. Petersburg on January 22, 1905, he was arrested, but on February 27 he was released on bail.
* Dmitiri Trepov was the general in charge of the tsar’s police forces in 1905, a hardline advocate of repressive action. He is not to be confused with Colonel Fyodor Trepov, the object of Vera Zasulich’s assassination attempt in 1878. See the article below, pp. 64–8, “The Problem of the ‘Hundred Peoples,’” for more about Maximilian Harden, pen name of a sensationalist entrepreneur in the newspaper business.
† The Decembrists were a group of revolutionaries from the Russian nobility, who organized on December 14, 1825 (old style) a military uprising against tsarist absolutism and the continued reign of feudalism. The uprising was suppressed the very same day by troops loyal to the tsar.
* In the summer of 1896 about 30,000 textile workers went on strike in St. Petersburg under the leadership of the (Marxist) League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. They demanded a shorter workday and payment for the days of work lost during the holidays celebrating the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. To prevent the strike from expanding into a general strike, the workers’ demands were partly granted, and after three weeks the strike ended.
* This is one of the first uses of the term “permanent revolution” by any commentator on or participant in the 1905 Revolution.
The Revolution in Russia [January 22, 1905]
* This article, “Die Revolution in Rußland,” appeared shortly after January 22, 1905 (January 9, old style), the “Bloody Sunday” in St. Petersburg, where tsarist forces massacred some 2,000 workers—men, women, and children. The article was first published in Neue Zeit, 1904–1905, No. 1, pp. 572–7. It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 477–84. Italicized words and phrases are by the author. Luxemburg wrote a large number of articles (in both German and Polish) in 1905 with the title “The Revolution in Russia.” For her coverage of the Russian revolution, Luxemburg introduced the Rubrik (standard heading for a section of a newspaper), “Die Revolution in Rußland.” Each time this standard heading occurs, we have added in square brackets the date of the issue of the newspaper in which it appeared, to distinguish the many different articles of this same heading. The date is given according to the Western calendar, not the one in use in Russia at the time, which was thirteen days earlier than the current one.
† These lines—Bald richt’ ich mich rasselnd in die Höh/Bald kehr’ ich riesiger wieder!—are from Ferdinand Freiligrath’s poem “Word of Farewell” (“Abschiedswort”). Marx printed the poem on the front page of the final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 19, 1849. By quoting these lines, Luxemburg indicates her view that, despite all the differences, the revolutionary era of 1848–1849 was being revived in the events of January 1905 in Russia.
* On January 7, 1905, the mineworkers at the Bruchstrasse pit in Langendreer stopped work in protest of the lengthening of the workday and the planned closure of some mines. By January 16, about 100,000 workers from other pits had joined them. Under the pressure of these mineworkers, the leaders of the so-called free trade unions, the Catholic unions, and the Hirsch-Duncker Mineworkers Federation, were finally forced to proclaim the strike officially on January 17. After that, 215,000 more workers joined the struggle for an eight-hour work shift, for higher wages, for mine safety, and for setting aside all regulations against political activity. On February 9 the strike was broken off without any gains being made. This was done against the will of the mineworkers by the strike leadership, in which reformists and heads of bourgeois union federations predominated.
† A reference to the demonstration of January 22, 1905 (January 9, old style) of 140,000 workers in St. Petersburg to the Winter Palace, asking that the tsar take steps to improve their conditions of life. The demonstrators, with women and children among them, were met with salvos of gunfire by order of the tsar. This bloodletting unleashed a wave of urban protest strikes and rural peasant disturbances throughout the Russian empire.
* In the mid-1890s, France made an alliance with tsarist Russia, directed against the German and Austro-Hungarian empires.
† Ben Akiba is considered one the founders of rabbinic Judaism. One of his reported sayings was, “He who esteems himself highly on account of his knowledge is like a corpse lying on the wayside: the traveler turns his head away in disgust, and walks quickly by.” For Luxemburg’s apparent confusion about Ben Akiba, given this rather derogatory comment about him, see Naomi Shepherd, A Price Below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), p. 114.
‡ Marx made the famous statement in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Marx was referring to Hegel’s Philosophy of History, which states, “In all periods of the world a political revolution is sanctioned in men’s opinion, when it repeats itself. Thus, Napoleon was twice defeated, and the Bourbons twice expelled. By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency, becomes a real and ratified existence.” See G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 313.
* The RSDRP, the Russian Social Democratic Party, was formed only seven years prior to the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution, in 1898. The first Social Democratic empire-wide party formed in the Russia Empire was the General Jewish Labor Bund, in 1897.
* Latin for “To the greater glory of liberty.”
* Followers of the French Workers’ Party of Jules Guesde. Luxemburg is referring to the criticisms launched against Guesde by reformist socialists over his adherence to Marxist orthodoxy. Hence her ironic comment about the “rigid dogmatists.”
* The Russo-Japanese War marked the first time that a non-Western nation-state had inflicted a crushing defeat on an imperialist power.
Revolution in Petersburg!
* This article, “Rewoluja w petersburskiego,” first appeared in Polish in Z Pola Walki of January 25, 1905. It is translated by George Shriver and Alicja Mann.
† This was formed in December 1902 as the Commercial Telegraph Agency (TTA, Torgovo-Telegrafnoe Agentstvo) under the Ministry of Finance, with the Torgovo-Promyshlennaya Gazeta being the main supplier of journalists. In February 1904, the agency changed its name to the St. Petersburg Telegraph Agency (SPTA). During the Soviet period, it was rebranded as TASS (Tyelyegrafnoye agyentstvo Sovyetskovo Soyuza).
* Following Luxemburg’s observations above about the tsarist regime’s “Bloody Sunday” massacre in St. Petersburg on January 22, 1905 are a number of news dispatches in the order in which they appeared in the foreign press, which she presents in Polish translation from the semi-official Russian agency, Petersburg Telegraph Agency (PTA). This takes up more than a page of the Polish-language publication Z Pola Walki (From the Field of Battle), No. 1, a supplement to Czerwony Sztandar (Red Flag), the monthly organ of the SDKPiL. In addition to the dispatches from the PTA, which give a nearly hour-by-hour account of the events of “Bloody Sunday,” she also cites various news items from different countries—a kind of press roundup taking up approximately two and a half more pages of the January 25, 1905 issue of Z Pola Walki—including reports from England, Austria (and Bohemia, part of the Austrian empire), Germany, and France.
The Revolution in Russia [February 8, 1905]
* In the German, this article was entitled “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It was first published in Die Gleichheit, No. 3, February 8, 1905, p. 13. It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 491–3. Italicized words and phrases are by the author.
† Jena is where Napoleon’s forces crushed the army of the Prussian monarchy in 1806. At the time of the event, Hegel was writing the concluding chapters of his Phenomenology of Spirit.
* A reference to the Populist movement.
The Problem of the “Hundred Peoples”
* This article first appeared in Die Neue Zeit, Vol. 1, 1904–1905, pp. 643–6. The journal apparently did not give the date when Luxemburg completed or submitted this article, but judging by the contents and the historical context it was sometime in February 1905. It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 494–9.
* A reference to the Karachay, a Turkish people living in the Caucasus region of southern Russia and northern Georgia. From the 1830s to the 1860s they carried out an active armed resistance to being incorporated into the Russian Empire.
† In the original Luxemburg uses “Renommisterie,” a rather arcane word.
‡ According to Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 BC), Sais is where the grave of Osiris is located, and on an adjacent lake “they enact by night the story of the god’s sufferings, a rite which the Egyptians call the Mysteries.” See Herodotus, The Histories, Book 2, Chapter 171, in Herodotus, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920). She is using this mythical reference to satirize the bourgeoisie’s mystification of parliamentary democracy. In doing so, she will have been aware of the massive popularization of interest in mysticism, in part precipitated by the reception of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, in which Osiris appears as a character in a number of scenes.
* The term Wends originally refers to Western Slavs living in German-controlled areas. Today’s Wends are an ethnic minority living in eastern Germany.
* Tanzt, o Polen—tanzt, o Deutsche, Alle nach der selben Peitsche! The lines were written by the German revolutionary poet Georg Herwegh (1817–1875). See Herweghs Werke in einem Band (Herwegh’s Works in One Volume) (Berlin-Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1967), p. 156.
† A town in Bessarabia where a series of pogroms against the Jews occurred in April 1903.
‡ That is, the uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863.
* Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Finland belonged to Russia as an autonomous grand duchy with its own Senate and Assembly (upper and lower houses of parliament). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the tsarist rulers increasingly sought to deprive Finland of its autonomy and to subordinate it completely to the central government.
† A double-headed eagle was the symbol of Russia’s Romanov dynasty.
‡ An insuperable force; a power greater than itself.
General Strike
* This article, whose title in Polish is “Strejk powszechny,” is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from Z Pola Walki, February 9, 1905, pp. 1–2, supplement to Czerwony Sztandar, No. 4, February–March 1905. Czerwony Sztandar was the monthly organ of the SDKPiL.
† Rosa Luxemburg’s emphasis.
* A conservative nationalist group in Galicia led by members of the nobility.
† The Polish National Democratic Party was founded by Roman Dmowski in 1897. It sought Poland’s independence from Russia by peaceful means, but upheld a right-wing, xenophobic perspective that sought to “purify” areas of Poland (such as Galicia) by expelling its national minorities.
* This refers to the Second Proletariat Party of Poland, which existed from 1888 to 1893. It was crushed owing to repression by the tsarist authorities. Luxemburg had joined the organization while still a teenager. The original Proletariat Party existed from 1882 to 1886.
† The proclamation of the Chief Executive Committee of the SDKPiL of January 25, 1905 was also reprinted in issue No. 24 of Czerwony Sztandar, No. 24, February–March 1905. The question of autonomy that was addressed in the proclamation was at the time not conclusively worked out within the SDKPiL. Only in 1908–1909 did Luxemburg present her views on this issue in detail in The National Question and Autonomy. See Rosa Luxemburg, Nationalitätenfrage und Autonomie, edited by Holger Politt (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2012). By 1908 she saw the Kingdom of Poland as being in a position to make use of territorial self-government, i.e., autonomy (which could include having certain legislative powers). In 1905, on the other hand, she spoke of autonomy only in terms of a general principle. The changes in this conception had much to do with the sharp rejection of the idea of a federative republic made by Luxemburg and Jogiches by those opposing her position in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and later the PPS-Lewica (the PPS-Left).
* After explaining the significance of the general strike that the Warsaw workers were calling for, the proclamation of the Warsaw committee presented the economic and political demands in more detail than had the SDKPiL Executive.
† The proclamation of the SDKPiL’s Warsaw committee of January 29, 1905 was also reprinted in Czerwony Sztandar, No. 24, February–March 1905.
‡ This was printed in the proclamation of the SDKPiL’s Social Democratic Youth Circle, calling on the students to come out in joint action with the workers.
* The Youth Circle’s proclamation, entitled “To Our Colleagues,” was also reprinted in Czerwony Sztandar, No. 24, p. 9ff. Immediately preceding the passages that Luxemburg quotes here, she wrote: “After many years of political inactivity we must again go into battle. We ought not to close ourselves off in our own narrow academic interests.” For more about the question of education in the Kingdom of Poland, see Luxemburg’s Nationalitätenfrage und Autonomie, pp. 223–40.
† The newspaper of the PPS published in Kraków.
‡ That is, a parliament.
§ Groch z kapustą—literally, pea soup with cabbage.
The Revolution in Russia [February 9 and 10, 1905]
* This article, “Die Revolution in Rußland,” first appeared in two parts in the SPD’s central party newspaper, Vorwärts: Part I on February 9, 1905, Part II on February 10. It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 500–8.
* That is, owners of country estates.
† Marx and Engels had emphasized the importance of the communal ownership of the land by Russia’s peasants as a possible basis for a socialist revolution in the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, but Luxemburg almost never references this in her writings.
* Luxemburg does not indicate the source of this quotation.
† Plekhanov had formed the putatively “Marxist” “Emancipation of Labor” group as far back as 1884, but it largely consisted of an organization of exiles. Marxist ideas only began to seriously inform the development of Social Democratic organizations in Russia in the 1890s. The first Social Democratic Organizations in the empire were actually formed by members of such national groupings as Poles, Lithuanians, and Jews.
* This is a reference to the Second Proletariat Party, founded in 1888, in which Luxemburg was a member. It was preceded by the First Proletariat Party, founded in 1882. That Luxemburg refers to the latter as the first Marxist or Social Democratic organization is due to the fact that the former was still largely under the influence of Populist ideas.
† “Und bald hing der Himmel voller Geigen,” i.e., everything was going wonderfully well.
‡ The group that led the strike was the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.
* It was this “economist” tendency that Lenin took sharp issue with in his famous pamphlet of 1903, What Is to Be Done?
† Karl Vogt was a German naturalist and zoologist; Darwin discussed him in The Descent of Man. An associate of Louis Agassiz, Vogt rejected Darwin’s account of human origins in favor of a polygenist theory of evolution that claimed whites are a separate species from black Africans. Active in left-wing politics during the 1848 revolutions, he sharply attacked Marx, who responded with his 1860 polemic Herr Vogt. Vogt’s racism and anti-Semitism notwithstanding, his avowal of atheism and materialism made him widely read in left-wing circles. In 1851, he established a single taxonomy for flatworms and nemerteans, which he called Platyelmia.
‡ On the initiative of the chief of the tsarist gendarmerie Sergei Zubatóv from 1901 to 1903, the regime made an attempt to divert workers from revolutionary struggle by allowing them to join legal workers’ organizations that were controlled by the police and emphasized religious and “patriotic” values and loyalty to the government, as well as nonpolitical social and cultural activities. Radical workers, however, found ways to bring these official organizations into strikes and protest actions, especially in the south of Russia, and by the end of 1903 the government discontinued them—only to allow a similar organization to start up in early 1904, Father Georgi Gapon’s “Assembly of St. Petersburg Plant and Factory Workers.”
§ Luxemburg does not quote what Bülow said in the Reichstag, since it was probably quite familiar to the readers of Vorwärts in early February 1905, but given his conservative and chauvinist politics one can easily imagine his advice to the striking mine workers in the Ruhr region.
* In Luxemburg’s original there was a typographical error, giving “1903” instead of the correct “1902.”
* Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War impelled the regime of Tsar Alexander II to embark on a series of reforms, the most important of which was the abolition of serfdom in 1861.
† The first Russo-Turkish war, from 1877 to 1878, consisted of an effort by Russia to strip the Ottoman Empire of its possessions in the Balkans and the Caucasus region. Russia and the Ottomans each had some 200,000 soldiers facing each other during the conflict.
‡ More than a million soldiers were mobilized on each side in the Russo-Japanese War.
The Revolution in Russia [February 11–16, 1905]
* This article, “Die Revolution in Rußland,” first appeared as a three-part series in the SPD newspaper Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung), No. 35, 36, and 39 on February 11, 12, and 16, 1905. It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 509–18.
† That is, something to be systematically studied. See Wilhelm Liebknecht, “Karl Marx zum Gedaechtnis. Ein Lebensriss und Erinnerungen” (To the Memory of Karl Marx: A Sketch of His Life and Some Recollections), Erinnerungen an Marx und Engels (Recollections about Marx and Engels) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1965), p. 77.
* Translations of both the RSDRP program and Father Gapon’s petition can be found in Sidney Harcave, The Russian Revolution of 1905, pp. 265–8 and 285–9.
* A quadrille is a square dance performed by four couples.
* That is, the urban dumas and the rural zemstvos.
† Svyatopolk-Mirsky became minister of the interior in 1904 and attempted to introduce liberal reforms—such as permitting the local zemstvos to meet regularly and lifting some restrictions on freedom of the press and religion. After accepting responsibility for the massacre in St. Petersburg of January 22, he was replaced in February 1905 by the more conservative Alexander Bułygin.
Terror
* This article first appeared in the SPD newspaper Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung, No. 42, February 20, 1905. It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 519–22. The dates given are according to the Western calendar (i.e., new style), rather than the calendar then in use in Russia (old style).
† On February 17, 1905, Grand Duke Sergei Romanov, governor-general of Moscow province, who was a member of the ruling family and one of the most reactionary representatives of the tsarist regime, was assassinated in the Kremlin by Ivan Kalyaev, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
‡ Plehve, who headed for a time the dreaded secret police, the Okhrana, served as interior minister from 1902 and was assassinated on July 28, 1904 by the Socialist Revolutionary Yegor Sazonov. In 1881, Plehve was assigned the task of investigating the murder of Tsar Alexander II.
Religious Procession of the Proletariat
* This article first appeared in Neue Zeit, 1904–1905, Vol. 1, pp. 711–14. The title in German, “Der Bittgang des Proletariats,” is difficult to translate. Literally, a Bittgang is “a going” (gang) with “a request” (Bitte), but the term has strong religious connotations, sometimes meaning “pilgrimage.” It can be rendered as “pilgrimage of supplication” or as “procession of pilgrims.” J. P. Nettl gives the wording as “The proletariats’ pilgrimage of grace”; see his Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. 2 (London and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 893. The article is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 523–7.
* Blaue Bohnen, or “blue beans,” is an archaic German colloquialism for bullets. Given that Luxemburg often uses sardonic and ornamental language, it seems appropriate to use a historical U.S. colloquialism here for bullets—blue pills.
* Karl von Rotteck, a pioneer of liberalism, served in the Baden state legislature from 1819 to 1840, first as the leader of the lower chamber, and later the leader of the upper chamber. In 1832, because of his progressive views, he was stripped of the academic chair he had held since 1798 at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. As a result, at the beginning of 1833 he was elected mayor of Freiburg, but the Baden state government refused to certify his election. Rotteck decided not to seek election a second time because of the danger that this would trigger a conflict between the city and the state.
* A friend of Max Weber, Naumann sought to develop a social liberal alternative to the Social Democratic movement by addressing issues of inequality and social justice from a middle-class perspective.
Under the Sign of Social Democracy
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from the first two pages of Czerwony Sztandar (Red Flag), No. 24, March 1905. The title in Polish is “Pod znakiem Socjaldemokracji.”
† Bashi-bazouks were irregular troop units serving the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were notorious for their brutality. In her “Junius Pamphlet” (The Crisis of German Social Democracy), Luxemburg used the expression “the maintenance of bashi-bazouk rule in Asia Minor.” See her Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 4, p. 109. These irregular troop units received weapons and provisions from the government of the Ottoman Empire, but were not provided with regular pay.
* The Warsaw Archiw Akt Novykh (AAN—Archive of Modern [Historical] Documents) contains a short document by Luxemburg about the history of Poland, originally written for the use of Franz Mehring. This handwritten manuscript, which could have been written in 1901 or 1902, was in the possession of Jürgen Kuczynski, who in 1952 turned it over to the Polish government. In it Luxemburg presents the following thoughts about the Polish nobility: “Everything that in Western Europe the Third Estate carried out against the nobility, here it was undertaken by the nobility itself. With the change of personnel, the methods utilized were also turned upside down. Factories producing luxury goods were supposed to bring about mass production on a scale equivalent to the period of manufacture [in Western Europe]. On the threshold of the nineteenth century there was a desire to summon cities into existence by reintroducing guilds, and to introduce an urban bourgeoisie into the political system by raising it to noble status. Legislative power was to be adapted to the needs of the times by limiting universal suffrage to the landowning nobility, and the government was to be strengthened and centralized—by the transfer of all its functions to a parliament [dominated by the nobility]. In short, they sought the salvation of Poland not in forward movement but in a return to forms that had long since been outlived. The Polish nobility was blamed for indulging itself in unheard-of class egoism. On the contrary, no other social class, to our knowledge, was ever doomed by history to such a state of self-abnegation as the Polish nobility. In the absence of a Third Estate it had to set itself against itself—like the thesis [and antithesis] of Hegel—and to fight against itself with a whole series of reforms. The Polish nobility had to, so to speak, in order to ultimately save itself as a class, dress itself in the costume of the Third Estate. But this historical costume drama, as at a Shrovetide carnival [Fastnachtspiel], betrayed itself in its end result. In the famous constitution of May 3, [1791], which supposedly was intended to save Poland, there now emerged, instead of modern social classes, whose spirit was supposedly expressed in the reforms [of that time], the same old two leading characters on the political stage—the upper nobility and the lesser nobility. Whereas the Polish nobility believed it could overcome itself as a class, it actually brought about only the victory of one clique (or faction) of the nobility, the lesser nobility, over the other, the upper nobility. And Poland could not be saved by that means.” This document is listed in the AAN in Warsaw as item 2/1223,63/III-1, sheet 14, pp. 12–15.
* Dziennik Poznański, No. 22, January 26, 1905, contains an article entitled “Z Warszawy” (From Warsaw), p. 3, with the following passage by Luxemburg: “As for the tsar, and indeed for his personal security and that of his family, a place could be found after the conclusion of peace … In such a large state, and one which today is so badly torn apart, undoubtedly the Kingdom of Poland is the only place in which security would be complete, regardless of whether it was in Warsaw, Skierniewice, or Spała. It remains doubtful, however, if anyone in the circles close to him would recommend this salutary step.” The newspaper Dziennik Poznański was published in Prussian-occupied Poznań. Spała was a small location, in central Poland, near Piotrków. Trybunalski was a hunting lodge serving the tsarist court; it was laid out in 1884, with a group of one hundred Cossacks assigned to it.
† A caryatid is a sculpture of a female that serves as a column. The most famous examples are built into the south porch of the Erechtheion in Athens, erected in the fifth century BC.
* Robert von Puttkammer was the conservative minister of the interior in Germany who enforced Bismarck’s antisocialist law and forcibly suppressed strikes during the 1870s and 1880s.
* Here Luxemburg gives the Polish wording, “pod tym znakiem zwyciężysz,” for the ancient motto (fourth century AD) attributed to the Roman Emperor Constantine I, in hoc signo vinces.
A Test Based on a Sample
* This article appeared in the SPD newspaper Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung, No. 52, March 3, 1905, under the title, “Eine Probe aufs Exempel.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 528–32. In this article, one can see what Luxemburg meant by her title—a test of various conceptions, “the idea of the general strike,” against the actual events, i.e., “based on a sample” of current reality—namely, the general strikes in the tsarist Russian empire of January–February 1905.
† Luxemburg is probably referring to the German mineworkers’ general strike in the Ruhr region in January–February 1905.
* This was the regional legislature of Prussia.
A Political Settling of the Score
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from Czerwony Sztandar, No. 25, April 1905, pp. 2–5. The Polish title is “Obrachunek polityczny.”
† The SDKP had been formed a year earlier, in 1893, through a fusion between the Union of Polish Workers and remnants of the Second Proletariat Party. Rejecting the principle of national self-determination for Poland, it defined itself largely in terms of its opposition to the policies of its main competitor on the left, the PPS.
* This was stated, not in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, but at the time of the founding of the First International (in 1864). The German reference is: “Die Befreiung der Arbeiterklasse muss das Werk der Arbeiterklasse selbst sein.” See Marx’s “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 13.
In the Bonfire Glow of the Revolution
* This article was published on the eve of May Day 1905—on April 29, 1905, in Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung, No. 98. The title in German is “Im Feuerschein der Revolution.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part. 2, pp. 537–40. Where the author uses the term Maifeier (literally “the May holiday”), we have often used “May Day.” This of course refers to May 1, which became the annual International Workers’ Day beginning in 1889, initiated by the socialist Second International. That date was chosen to honor events that first took place in the United States—mass marches in numerous cities by workers demanding the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886. The largest of those 1886 marches was in Chicago, where about 80,000 workers took part. The march was soon followed by the Haymarket incident and the subsequent legal execution, in 1887, of the socialist and anarchist leaders of the Chicago eight-hour-day movement. Italics are by Luxemburg, unless otherwise noted.
* The same might be said today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, about the rising demand for a livable minimum wage, to be increased as inflation increases.
May Day Massacres in Russia
* This report was not signed. Luxemburg’s authorship can be deduced from remarks she made in a letter to Leo Jogiches of May 2, 1905. See her Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, p. 82. The article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 101a, May 2, 1905. The title in German is “Maimetzeleien in Russland.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, p. 526.
† Von den Kulturstaaten—i.e., stemming from cultural tradition.
‡ That is, Tsar Nicholas II.
§ Luxemburg is referring to the events that took place at the time in Częstochowa.
Bloody May
* This report was not signed. Judging by her letter to Leo Jogiches of May 2, 1905, it is very likely that Luxemburg was the author. See her Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, p. 82. This item first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 102, 1905. The title in German is “Blutiger Mai.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 527–8.
The Revolution in Russia [May 4, 1905]
* This article, “Die Revolution in Rußland,” was not signed. Judging by her letter to Leo Jogiches of May 3, 1905, it is very likely that Luxemburg compiled the reports contained in it (translating them into German where necessary), and wrote the commentaries. See her Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, p. 86. The article first appeared in Vorwärts, the SPD’s central party newspaper, No. 103, May 4, 1905. It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 533–6.
† Berliner Handelsblatt, the Berlin Newspaper of Commerce.
‡ That is, with weapon bared—mit blanker Waffe.
* Luxemburg’s “correspondent” has been listing items of “agitational literature” produced by the SDKPiL during the weeks immediately preceding May 1, 1905.
* Bebel’s Open Letter, dated April 9, 1905, was distributed as a May Day leaflet in German by the SDKPiL leadership. For the original German wording, see August Bebel, Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften (Selected Speeches and Writings), Vol. 7, Part 2: 1899–1905, edited by Anneliese Beske and Eckhard Müller (Munich: Saur, 1997), p. 784 ff.
† It is not clear where this was “already mentioned.”
Murder in Warsaw
* This report was not signed. Judging by her letter to Jogiches of May 6, 1905, it is very likely that Luxemburg was the author. See her Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, p. 90. This item first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 106, May 7, 1905. The title in German is “Der Mord in Warschau.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 539–41.
* Mounted lancers.
† Luxemburg actually lived on this street with her family from 1873 to 1889 and again in 1906, when she participated in the revolution in Poland.
‡ Kasprzak was one of the pioneers of Polish Marxism. He joined the first Proletariat Party in 1885, was arrested, spent time in prison, and escaped. After the first Proletariat Party was crushed, he helped found the second Proletariat Party in 1888. He helped introduce Luxemburg to Polish revolutionary politics when she was still a teenager, and in 1889 helped smuggle her out of Poland when her arrest was imminent. He later worked closely with her in the SDKP and SDKPiL. See Luxemburg’s article in tribute to Kasprzak, “A Victim of the White Terror!” below, pp. 198–204.
§ “Czerwony Sztandar” (“The Red Flag/Banner”) was written by the Polish socialist Bolesław Czerwieński in 1881 and set to music by Jan Kozakiewicz. The song was an adaptation of “Le Drapeau Rouge,” written by the French socialist Paul Brousse in 1877 to mark the anniversary of the Paris Commune, which was sung to the melody “Le Chant du Depart.” “Czerwony Sztandar” became a popular song of the Polish socialist movement and was sung at demonstrations and strikes, as well as by prisoners before execution. It was banned by the tsarist authorities. The song was used by various left-wing groups, including the PPS and SDKPiL. It is a different song from the English “Red Flag” (which is regularly sung at events of the British Labour Party) and other versions, although they share a similar name and similar sentiments. Some sources have claimed that Luxemburg was the author of a German translation of “Czerwony Sztandar” around the turn of the century. However, this is disputed in Erhard Hexelschneider, “Rosa Luxemburg und die Künste. 2 unveränderte Auflage” in Rosa-Luxemburg-Forschungsberichte, No. 3 (Saxony: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, 2007). It is, in any case, hardly plausible that a German version of the song would have been sung in Warsaw. There are several versions of Czerwieński’s “Czerwony Sztandar” (for example, the PPS omitted verse two because it expressed hostility to the struggle for Polish independence) and it is impossible to know exactly which version of the song Polish workers were singing in the events Luxemburg mentions. The full version of the song is given on the front page of the SDKPiL newspaper Czerwony Sztandar, No. 1, November 1902.
A Year of Revolution
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from Z Pola Walki, No. 8, dated May 27, 1905. Its Polish title is “Rok rewolucji.”
† The line of poetry quoted as an epigraph by Luxemburg is from the epic poem Pan Tadeusz, cyli Ostatni zajazd na Litwie. Historia szlachecka z roku 1811 i 1812 we dwunastu księgach wierszem (Pan Tadeusz or The Last Foray in Lithuania. A Tale of the Gentry during 1811–1812 in Twelve Books of Verse), written by Adam Mickiewicz, the great national poet of Poland, in the 1830s. Pan Tadeusz depicted the life of the Polish gentry around the time of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, which had aroused great hopes in Poland of freedom from Russian tsarist rule. Earlier, Napoleon had created the nominally independent Duchy of Warsaw after his victory over Prussia in 1807. By 1809, this Duchy had a population of over four million and included Kraków and Lublin as well as Warsaw, plus a “Polish corridor” to Gdańsk, which was made a “free city” where French troops were stationed. But most Polish lands remained under the occupation of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Napoleon introduced a civic code and dictated a constitution for the Duchy of Warsaw, which gave the bourgeoisie legal equality with the nobility, but the nobility remained dominant in the government. Serfdom was abolished, but major restrictions on the peasants continued, to the benefit of the landowning nobility. The Duchy of Warsaw had a Polish army of 100,000, which Napoleon made use of in his 1812 invasion of Russia. Napoleon’s defeat in Russia led to the fall of the Duchy of Warsaw.
‡ See Luxemburg’s articles in Vorwärts about the May 1 demonstration in Warsaw and the general strike there on May 4, in her Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 526–8 and 539–41. These articles are translated from Luxemburg’s German texts in the present volume as “May Day Massacres in Russia,” “Bloody May,” and “Murder in Warsaw.”
* In the Polish text the last word of this sentence is literally the word for “resurrection.”
* In connection with the printing of the SDKPiL’s flyer for May Day 1904, the underground printshop of the SDKPiL was surrounded by the tsarist police on April 27, 1904. When those inside the printshop broke out, four tsarist police were killed. Marcin Kasprzak took responsibility for this. In September 1905, a military court condemned him to death and he was executed in the Warsaw Citadel. For more about Kasprzak and this case see “Long Live the Revolution,” below, pp. 214–16. See also Luxemburg’s article in German that appears in this volume as “A Victim of the White Terror,” pp. 198–204 below.
† About 1,000 workers took part in the demonstration demanding “bread and jobs” in Warsaw on June 26, 1904, according to the report in Czerwony Sztandar, No. 18, June 1904, p. 3. More than half of the demonstrators joined the protest march as it proceeded down Elektoralna Street in Warsaw. The Warsaw demonstration of October 23, 1904, against the call-up for military service, was reported on in Czerwony Sztandar, No. 21, October 1904, pp. 3–4. The Warsaw demonstration of October 30, 1904, against the military mobilization, was also reported on in Czerwony Sztandar, No. 21, October 1904, pp. 4–5.
* Gurcman was a member of the PPS.
† Wladisław Feinstein-Leder was taken into custody in connection with the arrest of Kasprzak and Gurcman, since he was one of the organizers of the underground SDKPiL printshop in the Wola district of Warsaw. After a long hunger strike, Feinstein-Leder won his release on bail in mid-December 1904.
Two Camps
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from Czerwony Sztandar, No. 26, May 1905. The Polish title of the article is “Dwa obozy.”
* The Uniates refers to the Eastern Catholic Churches.
† Dukhobors are a Christian sect that abhors materialism and the incessant pursuit of material wealth and advocates pacifism. It opposed both tsarism and the policies of the Orthodox Church.
‡ The Old Believers were traditionalists who broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-1600s over its effort to align Russian church liturgy with that of the Greek Orthodox Church. The Old Believers opposed these reforms and held to traditional Russian liturgy. At the time of the 1905 Revolution, close to 10 percent of the Russian population consisted of Old Believers.
* In English, Jerusalem Avenue in Warsaw, where workers were killed by tsarist government forces during the May 1 demonstration in 1905.
† About twenty Jews were killed during pogroms that occurred in Zhytomyr (a town in Ukraine) on May 7 and 8, 1905. The section of the city known as “Podol” was devastated.
* The Russian loss of Sevastapol during the Crimean War signaled its imminent defeat.
† Chinovniks were high-ranking government bureaucrats.
* This publication, edited by Aleksander Swiętokowsk, should not be confused with the Russian revolutionary publication of the same name.
† The ugodowcy were advocates of conciliation with tsarism.
* This was an extremely reactionary, pro-government Russian newspaper.
* All three were magnates of the upper nobility who supported such right-wing groups as the National Democrats.
To the Polish Intelligentsia
* This appeal was published in Czerwony Sztandar, No. 28, May 1905, p. 10, with the title in Polish of “Do inteligencji polskiej.” It is translated by George Shriver and Alicja Mann. The article was signed by the Chief Executive Committee, Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, Warsaw, May 1905. In some respects, it is a brief restatement of points Luxemburg made in her article “Dwa Obozy” (Two Camps), in the first pages of the same May 1905 issue of Czerwony Sztandar, appearing here pp. 135–43.
† The reference is to the Poznań region of German-occupied Poland and especially to Galicia in Austrian-occupied Poland, where some “national autonomy” was partially permitted.
A Giant Demonstration in Łódź
* This article first appeared anonymously in the main SPD newspaper, Vorwärts, No. 126, May 31, 1905. According to Luxemburg’s letter to Leo Jogiches of June 25 or 26, 1905, she was seeing to the publication of information about the events in Łódź (cf. her Gesammelte Briefe Vol. 2, p. 141). The title in German is “Eine Riesendemonstration in Łódź.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 543–5.
* This street was at the city limits.
The Cards Are on the Table
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from the June 1905 issue of Czerwony Sztandar, No. 27, June 1905, pp. 1–3. The title in Polish is “Otwarte karty” (literally, “Open Cards”).
† A ukase or ukaz in Imperial Russia was a proclamation of the tsar, government, or a religious leader (patriarch), that had the force of law. “Edict” and “decree” are adequate translations using the terminology and concepts of Roman law.
‡ In Greek mythology, a multi-headed dog that guards the gates to the underworld.
* Giving him a status, in his own right, equal to that of the prime minister.
* A reference to a Polish liberal newspaper.
† At the time Struve was a member of the liberal Union of Liberation party. Later, in October 1905, he cofounded the Constitutional Democratic party. For another article by Luxemburg, written around the same time and describing Struve’s “Open Letter” in fuller detail, see “Up-and-Coming Men in Russia,” below, pp.167–71.
The “Peaceful” Action of the PPS
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from Czerwony Sztandar, No. 27, June 1905, pp. 7–9. The title in Polish is “Akcja ‘pokojowa’ PPS.”
† A note by the editor of Czerwony Sztandar appears at this point in the original: “Emphasis added by us.”
‡ A note by the editor of Czerwony Sztandar in the original: “The same proclamation was also issued by the Łódź Committee of the PPS.”
* Note by the editor of Czerwony Sztandar: “For more about this, see the lead article in this issue.” This refers to “Otwarte karty” (The Cards Are on the Table) which appeared in the same June 1905 issue of Czerwony Sztandar as the present article. In “Otwarte Karty” Luxemburg discussed in particular a statement by Struve published in France in early June 1905, making clear his position of offering his services to the tsarist government, along with those of his party, the liberal party of the Russian nobility. See above, pp. 148–53.
† The preceding discussion about “abstinence” was sharply condemned by Jogiches, as follows: “And the dumb editor, out of unnecessary thoroughness and devotedness, inserts a superfluous passage about abstinence into the article ‘Akcja … PPS.’ This disrupts the proper inner proportions [of the article] and makes a bad impression” (see Luxemburg, Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, p. 141). In addition, as a result of errors in the typesetting of the original, incorrect figures appear in it about the losses in roubles that would be caused by a one-year consumer boycott of the tsarist government’s vodka monopoly. The numbers have been corrected here.
* Note by the editor of of Czerwony Sztandar: “PPS activists themselves described this extensively in their correspondence from Starachów, near Radom, published in the Kraków newspaper of the PPS, Naprzód [Forward]; see the issue for May 17, 1905.”
† Note by the editor of Czerwony Sztandar: “PPS members again wrote at length about this in the May 18 issue of Naprzód, in which you can read the following, word for word: ‘After two had fallen victim to the tsarist superpower in the days of May, along with a hundred others fallen in all of Poland, our local committee announces, following the example of other committees: One week of mourning, starting May 11. No pleasure, no amusements. Outward sign of mourning: crepe [black-fabric armband] on the left sleeve.’”
Honorable Gentlemen—Lawyers of Poland
* This article appeared in Czerwony Sztandar, No. 27, June 1905, pp. 9–10, as part of a section of that publication with the general heading, “From Our Country,” and a subsection with the general heading, “From the Life of [Our] Society.” The actual Polish title of the article—aside from the general headings of the section and subsection—is “Panowie adwokaci polscy.” It is translated by George Shriver and Alicja Mann.
* The statement is from the Book of Revelation, 3:16 and 3:17: “I know everything you have done, and you are not hot or cold. I wish you were one or the other. But since you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Holy Bible (New York: American Bible Society, 1995), p. 10,780.
Conference of Socialist and Revolutionary Organizations
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from Czerwony Sztandar, No. 27, June 1905, pp. 14–15.
† This refers, in part, to the article “Z doby rewolucyjnej: Co dalej?” (In Revolutionary Times: What Next?), which was published in Czerwony Sztandar, No. 25, April 1905, pp. 1–4. Shortly thereafter, Luxemburg published a second part of the article under the same title in a supplement to Czerwony Sztandar, No. 26, May 1905, pp. 1–16. For a German translation of those two parts, see Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 541–72. This two-part article from April and May of 1905 was reprinted shortly afterwards as a pamphlet published in Kraków—which is the pamphlet Luxemburg is here referring to. Later, in 1906, this work was again published as a separate pamphlet (this time in Warsaw), but as an expanded version with a new third part—and once again under same title, Co dalej. The full text of Co dalej as published in pamphlet form in Warsaw in 1906 will appear in Volume 4 of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.
* In fact, this largely conforms to the trajectory of Gapon’s future development. Upon fleeing Russia following the events of January 22, 1905, he drew close to the Socialist Revolutionary Party (after having extensive discussions with various leading Social Democrats in West Europe) but at the very end of 1905 he returned to Russia, whereupon he was executed by the SR when they discovered he was working for the Okhrana.
† The conference took place in Geneva on April 2–3, 1905, with the participation of eleven organizations from the tsarist empire, among them the PPS from Poland. The SDKPiL declined in advance to participate in this conference, as did the Bolshevik wing of the RSDRP. Later, the following joined in with the decision not to participate: the Menshevik wing of the RSDRP and the Bund, as well as the Social Democrats of Latvia and Armenia. The quotation cited by Luxemburg from Gapon’s invitation, although not the exact wording, is from an “Open Letter” to socialist parties of the Russian state published by Gapon on February 10, 1905.
Up-and-Coming Men in Russia
* This article appeared in the Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung, No. 140, June 21, 1905. Its title in German was “Die kommenden Männer in Russland.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 587–91.
† While Struve’s father used the “von” before his last name, the family being of German noble origin, Pyotr Struve himself did not use it. Nevertheless, in her text Luxemburg calls him “von Struve” for reasons of her own.
‡ Russia’s huge Baltic Fleet had been sent in September 1904 to sail halfway around the world to the Far East to fight Japan, but after many months it arrived on the scene only to be destroyed in the battle of Tsushima Straits on May 14, 1905.
§ Das Karnickel—literally, “rabbits.”
* The Franco-Russian alliance was begun in 1894.
† That is, Vietnam.
‡ Struve was interested in competing against the Triple Alliance for the spoils of the Ottoman Empire.
* St. Paul’s Church was a Lutheran Church in Frankfurt used as a meeting place during the German revolution of 1848–1849. It was here that the Frankfurt Assembly drew up its proposed constitution for a united Germany.
† Actually, this occurred in November 1904.
‡ That is, on the alert.
Russian Party Controversies
* This article appeared in Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung No. 142, June 23, 1905. The article’s title in German was “Russische Partei-streitigkeiten.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 592–4.
† The Third Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party took place in London, April 25–May 10, 1905 (new style). It was the first party congress of the Bolsheviks. The real founding congress of the RSDRP occurred in Brussels and London in July 30–August 23, 1903 (new style). It was called the “Second Congress,” because the first attempt at a founding congress occurred in Minsk in March 1898. The 1903 congress, the real founding congress, was where the famous split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks occurred.
‡ According to the organizational statutes of the RSDRP, the right to call a party congress was invested in the party’s Council, whose chairman then was Georgi Plekhanov. Plekhanov had supported the majority at the 1903 congress, but then switched sides and joined the Mensheviks. From the late summer or fall of 1903, and continuing at the time when Luxemburg wrote this article, the Mensheviks dominated the party Council of the RSDRP as well as its newspaper Iskra. Since Plekhanov refused to call a party congress, the Bolsheviks took the initiative to do so themselves. An ad hoc consultative body of twenty-two representatives of Bolshevik-led party committees, most of them active inside Russia, issued an appeal calling on party members to speak out in support of holding a party congress and to pass resolutions to that effect. By April 1905 the overwhelming majority of party organizations had agreed that a party congress should be called, and so the “Third Congress” was held even though the party Council continued to oppose it.
§ Because of the small number who took part in the Menshevik gathering—delegates showed up from only nine party committees—it was called a “conference of active members.”
* Although some later commentators (as well as her critics within the official Communist movement from the mid-1920s onward) claimed that at the time Luxemburg was closer to the Mensheviks than the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg’s above statement (as well as many others made in this period) shows that she was critical of both tendencies—though the Bolsheviks come in for the harsher criticism here.
† Karl Kautsky’s article “Die Spaltung der russischen Sozialdemokratie” (The Split in the Russian Social Democratic Party) appeared in the Leipziger Volkszeitung, No. 135, June 15, 1905. For Lenin’s response to Kautsky’s article (written in June 1905 but apparently not published until 1931), see V. I. Lenin, Complete Works, Vol. 8 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962), pp. 531–3.
‡ It appears that “Gr.” stood for Grigori Zinoviev, a close associate of Lenin at the time and after 1917 head of the Communist International. In a letter to Zinoviev of August 24, 1909, Lenin explicitly addresses him as “Dear Gr.” See V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 399.
* Birk, a publisher and bookseller in Munich who was associated with the SPD, published a German translation of the Third Congress of the RSDRP in 1905.
† The response of “Gr.” to Kautsky appeared in the June 17, 1905 issue of Frankfurter Volksstimme.
Strike-Revolution in Łódź
* This article first appeared anonymously, without Luxemburg’s signature, in the main SPD newspaper, Vorwärts, No. 145, June 24, 1905. It is clearly by Luxemburg, as indicated by the fact it includes a summary of recent events culled from different press reports—a standard format used by her in her writings on the 1905 Revolution in Vorwärts. The title in German is “Streikrevolution in Łódź.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 546–8.
The Street Battle in Łódź
* This article first appeared anonymously, without Rosa Luxemburg’s signature, in Vorwärts, No. 146, June 25, 1905. The title in German is “Die Strassenschlacht in Łódź.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 549–52.
† See the article “Strike-Revolution in Łódź,” above, pp. 175–7.
* The holiday was the Feast of Corpus Christi.
Outbreak of Revolution in Łódź: June Days
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from Z Pola Walki, the supplement to the monthly publication of the SDKPiL, Czerwony Sztandar. The supplement Z Pola Walki appeared occasionally throughout 1905, starting with No. 1, dated January 25, and dealing with the events of “Bloody Sunday” in St. Petersburg, which happened on January 22. The issue of Z Pola Walki from which this article about Łódź is translated is No. 10, dated June 30, 1905, pp. 1–2. The article’s title in Polish is “Wybuch rewolucji w Łódzi,” with the subhead “Dni czerwcowe” (June Days).
On Top of the Volcano
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from Z Pola Walki, No. 11, August 28, 1905. Its title in Polish is “Na wulkanie.”
† “We are going forward!” is from a French revolutionary song. It has the same sense as such expressions as “We shall overcome.”
‡ A reference to the battleship Potemkin, one of the crown jewels of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. The crew revolted against the ship’s officers on June 27, 1905 over the dreadful living conditions aboard the ship, and upon taking control hoisted the red flag and declared its solidarity with the revolution. After a series of confrontations with vessels that remained loyal to the Russian Navy, the Potemkin sailed to the Romanian port of Constanta, where the crew was given asylum. Russia obtained the ship from Romania soon afterwards and renamed it the Panteleimon.
* For instance, the strikes that occurred in the Dabrowa basin.
† That is, in Lublin, too, the workers went on strike.
The “Constitution” of the Knout
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from the August 1905 issue of Czerwony Sztandar, No. 28, August 1905, pp. 1–4. Its title in Polish is “‘Konstytucja’ Knuta.” Luxemburg referred to the tsarist regime as “the rule of the knout” in her writings of this period.
† The Bułygin Constitution was named after Alexander Bułygin, who became Russian prime minister in late January 1905 in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday. In response to the threat posed by the revolution, in February 1905 he proposed a constitution that would provide a veneer of parliamentarism while leaving real power in the hands of the tsar and his administration (it became effective in August 1905). The Bułygin Constitution provided for a merely advisory Duma (or parliament) in which workers, women, servicemen and students had no representation whatsoever. Peasants were permitted to vote, though they received far less representation than landowners.
* In this piece and others written in this period, Luxemburg often puts “Duma” in quotation marks, to indicate her disdain for an ineffective institution that bought off the masses when they revolted.
† On the previous page “130 million” is given for the population of the tsarist empire, as against “140 million” here. Luxemburg gives various figures for the population of the empire—in large part because the most recent (and only) imperial census was conducted in 1897. That census gave a figure of 135 million—but the number was surely higher by 1905.
* This refers mainly to Turkic-speaking Azerbaijani Muslims. Tatar soldiers were used in the Caucasus to attack the Armenian labor movement as part of the government’s divide-and-rule policy of fomenting hostility between the predominantly Christian Armenians and Muslim Tatars. At the same time, however, the Tatars often faced discrimination and repression of their national rights by the tsarist regime. In Western Europe at the time, the term “Tatar” was most often used as an epithet, as was “Asiatic” or “Oriental.”
† A reference to the numerous pogroms launched against Jews, most often with the active consent of tsarist authorities. It bears noting that Luxemburg sees such pogroms as a response to the militancy of the Jewish working class.
* That is, Poland.
* Luxemburg’s criticism here is directed mainly at some of the Mensheviks.
* The Union of Unions (Soyuz Soyuzov) was a political organization of largely professional groups drawn from the liberal-bourgeois intelligentsia, such as physicians, lawyers, writers, journalists, pharmacists, college professors, etc. At its founding conference in Moscow in May 1905, it contained fourteen unions, of which nine consisted of groups of professionals. It also included the Union of Railroad Employees (which was a mixture of manual laborers and railroad officials), the Union of Clerks and Bookkeepers, the Union for the Achievement of Full Rights of Jews, and the Union for Equal Rights of Women. From its inception, it was led by Pavel Milyukov, a Russian liberal. The Union of Unions advocated the abolition of the monarchy, the formation of a Constituent Assembly, and the introduction of democratic governance. As the 1905 Revolution progressed, it moved to the left on some issues, calling for a boycott of the Bułygin Duma. Despite providing support for the revolution, it did not assume a leading role in it (it was much overshadowed by the soviets or workers’ councils). It was disbanded in 1906 after a series of disputes between liberals and more radical elements, which had emerged in October and November 1905. The Union of Unions should not be confused with the Union of Liberation (also headed by Milyukov), which was primarily comprised of bourgeois liberals and played a less active role in the revolution.
† That is, slogans encouraging the boycott of elections to the Duma.
* By “reigning non-government,” Luxemburg means the shadow of a constitutional government that will be produced by the Bułygin Constitution.
A Victim of the White Terror
* This article in memory of Kasprzak, “Ein Opfer des weißen Terrors!,” first appeared in the newspaper Leipziger Volkszeitung, No. 210, September 11, 1905, two days after Kasprzak was hanged in Warsaw by the tsarist government. It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 553–8. The article was not signed, but is almost certainly by Luxemburg. In a letter to Jogiches of September 15, 1905, she promised an additional article about Kasprzak, which was published in Polish under the title “Niech żyje rewolucja!” (“Long Live the Revolution”) in Z pola walki, No. 12, September 30, 1905. For the latter, see pp. 214–16 below. A copy of this article was first found in the Moscow archive RGASPI (Rossiysky Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Sotsialno-Politicheskoi Istorii—Russian State Archive for Social and Political History), Collection 209, which contains archived material providing the basis for further volumes of Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke.
† Luxemburg was politically and personally close to Kasprzak since she was a teenager. He played a role in introducing her to revolutionary politics and helped her flee Poland in order to avoid arrest by tsarist authorities in 1889.
‡ That is, insulting the monarch.
§ The Okhrana, the regime’s secret police.
¶ This refers to the First Proletariat Party, the first Marxist party in Russian-occupied Poland. It was formed in 1882. By 1886 it suffered many blows due to repression and only fragments of it existed by 1887. In 1888 Kasprzak helped form the Second Proletariat Party out of remnants of the earlier party and several other organizations.
* “Reorganizing” in the sense of creating a new party, the Second Proletariat Party, in which Kasprzak became coleader.
† The Second Proletariat Party went out of existence in 1893, when it merged into the Polish Socialist Party. It is the latter group that Luxemburg refers to later in this article of having betrayed Kasprzak.
‡ Both the First and Second Proletariat Party opposed demands for self-determination and independence for Poland. The PPS, on the other, supported Polish independence—a position Luxemburg’s SDKP and SDKPiL always opposed.
§ Following the collapse of the Second Proletariat Party, Kasprzak joined the Polish Socialist Party in Prussia (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna Zaboru Pruskiego, or PPS-ZP), which represented Polish Social Democrats living in German-occupied Poland. In 1903, the PPS-ZP removed his name from a list of prospective candidates for elections to the Reichstag, in part because of his support for the SKDPiL’s opposition to Polish national independence.
* As Luxemburg saw it, any concession to “nationalist” demands for independence seriously undermined the politics of class struggle. The PPS, on the other hand (as well as many other groups in the Second International) did not see the two as incompatible.
† That is, those in the PPS-ZP and its parent organization, the PPS.
‡ Kasprzak plead his case to the SPD, but despite there being considerable support for him in the party, no action was taken, largely in order to avoid inflaming tensions with the PPS-ZP.
§ Luxemburg is referring to an item entitled “Note from Breslau,” dated August 20, 1895. The “Note from Breslau” appeared in the Leipziger Volkszeitung, No. 193, August 21, 1895, and stated the following: “Our Polish comrade Marcin Kasprzak, a man of great integrity, thoroughly devoted to the cause, and very much an upright person, who had been dragged into the big anti-socialist trial in Poznań in 1888, but who broke out of the Poznań prison with great skill, has recently been arrested in Breslau. At that time, Kasprzak had squeezed himself, naked, out of a cell window and then by holding on to gutters and drainpipes, outcroppings from the wall, and lighting-rod cables had worked his way to the ground.” The article went on to attack the conservative newspaper Schlesische Zug (Silesian Express) for defending Kasprak’s arrest and branding him a “nihilist and anarchist” terrorist.
* Poznań (then called Posen) was one of the oldest cities in Poland, serving as its capital during part of the thirteenth century. It came under the control of Prussia in 1793, during the second partition of Poland.
† He made this request to the SDKPiL.
* That is, thugs working for the police.
* Von Bülow was chancellor at the time.
† [Footnote by Luxemburg] The following message was sent to Chancellor von Bülow from five SPD members of the Reichstag:
In the course of the last few days the SPD Executive members of the Reichstag present in Berlin have appealed on behalf of Kasprzak for intercession by the chancellor and the Foreign Office of the German Reich. The telegram sent to the chancellor read as follows: To the Chancellor of the German Reich, Prince von Bülow of Baden-Baden: On September 1, 1905, in Warsaw the Prussian citizen Marcin Kasprzak was sentenced to death. The defendant’s lawyers appealed this sentence. The appeals court is located in St. Petersburg. Based on the state of martial law in Warsaw, the governor-general prevented the appeals documents from being sent. This prohibition is a violation of the rights legally guaranteed to the defendant. The undersigned are asking that the chancellor, as well as the Foreign Office, in view of the short time remaining before the sentence is to be carried out, immediately present a demand to the Russian government that it set aside the execution of the sentence and grant the defendant the rights legally belonging to him. An analogous telegram has been sent to the secretary of state of the Foreign Office. A reply is requested by the following Members of the Reichstag: [Ignaz] Auer, [Alwin] Gerisch, [Brutus] Molkenbuhr, [Wilhelm] Pfannkuch, and [Paul] Singer; No. 60 Lindenstrasse, Berlin.”
Remarks at the Jena Congress on Relations Between the Party and the Trade Unions, with Reference to the 1905 Revolution in Russia [September 1905]
* These remarks by Luxemburg are excerpted from the minutes of the SPD’s Jena Congress, held on September 17–23, 1905. The proceedings were published as Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands. Abgehalten zu Jena vom 17. bis 23. September 1905 (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1905). The comments by Luxemburg are from pp. 256–7 and 269–71 of the Protokoll and are translated from the text in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 595–603. Interjections from the floor are in parentheses and are often in quotation marks. Luxemburg’s remarks mainly consist of rejoinders to comments by Robert Schmidt, a member of the Reichstag and leading revisionist and spokesman for the conservative views of the SPD union leaders. It is translated by George Shriver.
† At the time, Kautsky served as chief editor of Neue Zeit.
‡ In response to growing divisions with the SPD over attitudes toward the mass strike, the party established a “Fifteenth Commission” at its Jena Congress of September 1905 in order to look into the disagreements on this issue between different SPD newspapers, in particular Vorwärts and Leipziger Volkszeitung. The Commission rejected calls from right-wing figures that the discussion of the mass strike be shelved because it allegedly (as claimed by the rightists) represented a mere “squabble among the literati.”
* At the time, Legien was chairman of the General Commission of the German Trade Unions, which was affiliated with the SPD.
† An Arbeiterkammer was a professional association of workers and employers, roughly equivalent to a “municipal labor exchange,” in which union officials were encouraged to enter on a parity basis with the employers.
‡ That is, Zunftgedanken—elements found in wage agreements that were analogous to those that formerly benefited skilled master craftsmen in feudal times.
* Because Luxemburg’s speaking time had run out, she was not able to conclude her remarks on this subject until she made a renewed request to speak somewhat later during the proceedings of the Jena Congress. Her later comments follow.
† This paper was the Deutsche Bergarbeiter-Zeitung.
‡ “Probieren geht übers Studieren”—a German proverb comparable to the English “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
* Kasprzak was hanged by the tsarist government in Warsaw on September 9, 1905, ten days before the opening of the SPD’s Jena Congress.
† Latin for “The facts speak for themselves.”
‡ Also known as the Catholic Center Party, a right-of-center party formed in 1870 that by the 1890s favored Germany’s military build-up and colonial expansion. In 1933, the party voted in favor of Hitler’s Enabling Act, which enabled him to assume total power.
* This famous play by Friedrich Schiller, long considered a profound expression of the longing for freedom, was first performed in 1804.
† These comments by Luxemburg come from later in the conference.
* Haben im Zügel—rein them in.
† In 1902 a general strike was called in Belgium—its first since 1893—in response to the demands of coal miners for an improvement of their living and working conditions. While Vandervelde (who at the time was chairman of the International Socialist Bureau) and other leading Belgian Social Democrats initially supported the strike, they viewed it purely in terms of obtaining electoral reforms that would widen the franchise, not as a serious effort to challenge the dominance of capital. Due to lack of widespread support the strike was defeated.
‡ During the Belgian strike of 1902, the socialists made a secret agreement with the liberals, calling off the strike in return for liberal support in changing the Belgian constitution to ensure universal suffrage, but the liberals failed to carry out their promises. As part of this agreement, the Belgian socialists conceded to the demands of the liberals to abandon the call for women’s suffrage. For Luxemburg’s stinging attack of this capitulation, see “A Tactical Question,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Books, pp. 233–6).
“Long Live the Revolution”
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from the Polish publication of the SDKPiL, Z Pola Walki, No. 12, September 30, 1905. The Polish phrase “Niech żyje rewolucja” (Long live the revolution) were the last words spoken by Marcin Kasprzak before his execution in Warsaw in early September 1905 in a tsarist prison.
† A nagaika is a leather whip.
* For the accusations made against him, including by some in the PPS, see, “A Victim of the White Terror,” pp. 198–204, above.
To Arms Against the “Constitution” of the Knout!
* This article is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from Z Pola Walki, No. 13, October 18, 1905. Its title in Polish is “Do walki przeciw ‘Konstytucji’ Knuta!”
† This conference was called by the Central Committee of the RSDRP, shortly after the party’s Third Congress. At the conference the Bolsheviks argued for a boycott of the Duma, whereas the Mensheviks favored participation in it. The position of the Bolsheviks—which aligned with Luxemburg’s views—was adopted by the conference.
‡ See the article “The ‘Constitution’ of the Knout,” above, pp. 190–7.
* Though Luxemburg singles out the PPS here by name, it was (as she notes) the Bolsheviks who forcefully argued at the conference, “the pressing task of the moment is the preparation for an armed popular uprising.” Luxemburg often criticized the Bolsheviks, at times openly and at other times implicitly, during this period for what she considered its overemphasis on armed insurrection.
* The “Black Hundreds” refers to xenophobic, reactionary nationalist groupings that attacked ethnic and national minorities (especially Jews) as part of an effort to intimidate opponents of tsarism. It was a well-organized movement that published a series of newspapers and organized political demonstrations and pogroms—often with the direct support of government officials.
* The Mensheviks.
† Guria is in the southwest region of Georgia. The Russian Empire conquered the area in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War of 1806–12. In 1902 the peasants of area, supported by the Social Democrats, initiated a rebellion that led to independent Gurian Republic, which lasted until 1906. It has been termed the first effort since the Paris Commune of 1871 of “socialists seizing political power and attempting to realize their vision of a new society.” See Eric Lee, The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918–21 (London: Zed Books, 2017), p. 7. The extent of the Mensheviks’ support in the region was shown after the 1917 Revolution, when they won 80 percent of the parliamentary vote in the newly independent (but short-lived) Democratic Republic of Georgia.
* As she does several times during this period, Luxemburg is making a distinction between how a revolutionary tendency treats mistaken policies and ideas on the part of fellow Marxists as compared to its enemies among the bourgeoisie. She will later make a similar distinction in criticizing the Bolsheviks in 1918 (in her booklet The Russian Revolution) for their suppression of the democratic rights of left-wing critics of the regime.
† The terrorist tactics adopted at times by some in the PPS, and more often by the SR and anarchists, fall under Luxemburg’s criticism here.
A New Epoch in the Russian Revolution
* This article, “Eine neue Epoche de russischen Revolution,” was not signed, but it is clearly by Luxemburg. It first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 251, October 26, 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 567–73. The emphasis throughout the article (as in all others in this volume) is in Luxemburg’s original.
† Count Witte was finance minister from 1892 to 1903 and Chairman of the Council of Ministers from October 1905 to April 1906. He was a monarchist, but was, during certain periods, ready to accept a pact with the bourgeoisie and to grant constitutional concessions. He played a major role in suppressing the revolution.
* Mittelschulen in the original text.
* The reference is to Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.
The Revolution Advances
* Although this article, “Der Vormarsch der Revolution,” was unsigned, Luxemburg’s authorship can be verified based on her letter to Jogiches of September 29, 1905, and in particular her letter to Jogiches of October 6, 1905. See Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, pp. 177 and 183. The article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 252, October 27, 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 574–8.
* Luxemburg means the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, published in August Scherl’s publishing house from 1833 onward and called “the Scandal Advertiser” by the workers.
† An obsolete Russian unit of length, equal to 1.0668 kilometers.
‡ Luxemburg had written “decision” (Beschluß) rather than “back” or “conclusion” (Schluß) in her original text.
* Many of these pharmaceutical workers in this period became part of the Union of Unions.
† The Putilov Iron Works was a major metal and machine-making factory that employed 12,000 at the time of the revolution. Workers there had already gone out on strike in early January 1905, presaging the revolutionary upsurge. Many Putilov workers were part of Father Gapon’s march to the Winter Palace later that month, and several were killed in the ensuing massacre.
* This was a news agency founded by William MacKay Laffan, who at the time was owner of the New York Sun newspaper.
† A city in western Germany.
Catastrophe Impending?
* Although this article, “Vor der Katastrophe,” was published anonymously, Luxemburg’s authorship can be presumed based on her letters to Jogiches from September 29, 1905 onward, and in particular her letter to Jogiches of October 6, 1905. See Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, p. 177 and 183. The article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 253, October 28, 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 579–84.
* Faced with the political general strike, the tsarist government felt forced to grant constitutional concessions. In the tsar’s manifesto of October 30, 1905, he promised to grant civil freedoms, to extend the franchise of those entitled to vote for the Duma, and to grant legislative power to the Duma. However, these were only promises.
The Russian Volcano
* Although this article, “Der russische Vulkan,” was published anonymously, Luxemburg’s authorship can be presumed based on her letters to Leo Jogiches from September 29, 1905 onward, and in particular her letters to Jogiches from October 6, 1905 onward. See Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, pp. 177 and 178. The article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 254, October 29, 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 585–9.
† This is an indirect reference to the soviets—the spontaneously generated, decentralized and democratic forms of workers’ self-organization that had a major impact on the 1905 Revolution.
* This is a reference to the tsar’s manifesto of October 1905.
* Terrified at the prospect that the revolution threatened an imminent collapse of the regime, Tsar Nicholas II—after initially favoring a harsh military crackdown to “restore order”—was prevailed upon to appoint the liberal-minded Witte as prime minister, in October 1905. Witte was constantly frustrated by a refusal on the part of tsar and the royal family to accept genuine political reforms, and in 1906 he was forced from power by reactionary hardliners.
The Revolution in Russia [October 31, 1905]
* This article, originally entitled “Die Revolution in Rußland,” is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 590–5. Although the article is unsigned, Luxemburg certainly is the author. It accords with the agreement reached with the party executive on October 23, 1905, about which she wrote to Jogiches on October 24–5, 1905: “As you can see, we have to count on me having these two lead articles for the Vorwärts weighing me down from now on, but on top of that, e.g., K. K. [Karl Kautsky] [is] demanding that I should direct the Russian section [of Vorwärts], albeit only via working from home (through notes)—so that means rather a lot of work.” See Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, pp. 213–14. Luxemburg became the leading political editor of Vorwärts, with responsibility for the column “The Revolution in Russia” from the end of October. On November 1, 1905, she wrote to Jogiches: “You see, since yesterday I’ve been involved with Vorwärts on a daily basis, having to start from four in the afternoon. It is evident that the wagon is stuck in the mud, and I have to help energetically to get it out. Yesterday I wrote the lead article on the spot and worked through all telegrams about Russia. Today I’m going to write the lead article again on Russia.” See Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, pp. 228 and 235.
* Throughout his career, but especially during the 1905 Revolution, Pobedonostsev was an extremely reactionary figure that sought to “cleanse” Russia of non–Christian Orthodox denominations and peoples, most of all the Jews.
† Nagaika was a short, thick whip often used by Cossacks.
* Luxemburg is referring to an incident in which some German citizens were illegally abused by Cossacks.
* Lenin was later to return to Russia during the 1917 Revolution through this very same railway station in Beloostrov.
Our Task
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 256, November 1, 1905. Its title in German is “Unsere Aufgabe.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 596–9. This lead article in Vorwärts is a statement of purpose on behalf of the new editorial board of Vorwärts, which Luxemburg discussed in a letter to Jogiches of November 1, 1905 (see her Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, p. 228). After the death of Wilhelm Liebknecht, Vorwärts came closer to the revisionist elements in the SPD, and in 1905 it sided with the opponents of the mass strike, thus stirring indignation among the majority of SPD members. This issue figured largely at the SPD’s Jena Congress (September 1905), which established the “Fifteenth Commission” to look into the issue. After the Commission rejected the revisionist arguments against the mass strike, Vorwärts published a statement of resignation by six of its editors (which included supporters of Eduard Bernstein, such as Kurt Eisner). A new editorial board was established at that point, with Luxemburg as the “responsible editor.” Her position began on November 1, 1905.
* Kautsky wrote on a visitor’s card to Luxemburg on Saturday, October 28, 1905: “Dear Rosa, The interregnum comes to an end tomorrow, and you are festively, that is, officially, hereby invited as a collaborator to be part of the new editorial board. Be there tomorrow, Sunday, 10 a.m., at an editorial session that will regulate everything else. Your first duty: a lead article will be expected from you on Tuesday [October 31]. You yourself will work out everything else, together with the others. Long live the revolution in all corners and ends of the earth. Yours, K.K.” The text of Kautsky’s card is found in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, p. 225.
† The following were members of the editorial board in addition to Luxemburg: Hans Block, Georg Davidsohn, Wilhelm Düwell, Arthur Stadthagen, Carl Wermuth, Heinrich Cunow, Heinrich Ströbel and Fritz Kunert.
The New Constitutional Manifesto of Nicholas the Last
* This article, “Da neue Verfassungsmanifest Nikolaus’ des Letzten,” was not signed. It follows the lead article, “Unsere Aufgabe” (Our Task), on the front page of Vorwärts, No. 256, November 1, 1905. Luxemburg indicated her authorship in a letter to Jogiches, also on November 1. See her Gesammelte Briefe Vol. 2, p. 228. It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 601–3.
† An English translation of the tsar’s manifesto may be found in Sidney Harcave, The Russian Revolution of 1905, pp. 195–6. Elections to the Bułygin Duma were scheduled to be held by January 15, 1906, based on another manifesto issued by the tsar in August 1905.
‡ The Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg was one of the places the tsar was residing in at the time.
§ Faced with an unexpected revolutionary outburst in March 1848, Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV announced plans for a constitution, freedom of the press, and other reforms. These promises were quickly reversed as he moved in the weeks afterwards to suppress the revolution.
¶ That is, Nicholas II.
* Luxemburg is here using a phrase that Marx employed in response to the infighting among the exiles from the 1848 Revolution. See “Heroes of the Exile,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), p. 310: “And the very fact that they fought each other so bitterly led each to believe in the importance of the other. Anyone who wishes to pursue the study of this great war between the frogs and the mice will find all the decisive original documents in the New-Yorker Schnellpost.”
* The Polish equivalent of ça ira! would be “Iidziemy naprzód” (“We’re moving forward”). In other eras, similar phrases have been used: “We shall overcome!” and “Venceremos!”
“Powder Dry, Sword Well Sharpened”
* This article, “Da Pulver trocken, das Schwert geschliffen,” first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 257, November 2, 1905. It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 604–6. The article was not signed, but it is clear that she is the author based on Luxemburg’s letter to Jogiches of November 1, 1905. See her Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, p. 228.
† See The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 11, p. 107: “It was enough to hear the self-complacent howl of victory with which Messieurs the Democrats congratulated each other on the beneficial consequences of the second Sunday in May 1852”—the day that the term of Louis Bonaparte was supposed to expire. This was of course followed by the “fiasco” of Napoleon III’s seizure of power.
‡ Rudolf Mosse was the publisher of the Berliner Tageszeitung (Berlin Daily), which was linked with the liberal Free Thinkers Association.
§ The German Free Thinkers Association was formed in 1881 by followers of the positivist philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Atheistic and materialist in orientation, it nevertheless opposed revolutionary action by the working class.
* The ellipsis is in the original.
† A famous phrase from Faust; Goethe was one of Luxemburg’s favorite authors.
* The phrase originates from Oliver Cromwell, who reportedly voiced it to his troops during his campaign against Ireland in the 1600s. However, the actual phrase used by him was, “Put your trust in God; but mind to keep your powder dry.”
The Tsar’s “Constitution,” Modified by Mass Murder
* The title of this article in the original German is “Die zaristische ‘Verfassung,’ gemildert von den Massenmord.” We have given a fairly literal rendering of the title. An alternative translation might be: “From the Tsar, a ‘Constitution’ with a Qualifying Condition—Mass Murder.” The article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 258, November 3, 1905. It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 609–15. The article was not signed, but in all likelihood is by Luxemburg. On November 1 she wrote to Jogiches: “The SPD executive decided to pay twenty marks for a lead article and five marks daily for the Russia section, and for brief notices ten pfennigs per line.” This amounted to about 350 marks per month (See Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 2, pp. 228, 235).
* As indicated earlier, the Bułygin Duma would have been a purely consultative “parliament” based on extremely restricted voting rights, essentially window dressing for a continued all-powerful monarchy.
† “Beruhigungsmittel” in the original, which can also be translated as “tranquilizing device.”
* The parenthetical question mark is in the original.
† Bauman was a popular Moscow Bolshevik assassinated by the Black Hundreds during the days immediately following the tsar’s “constitutional manifesto,” shortly after he was released from prison. The enormous funeral procession honoring him and bearing his coffin to a cemetery is described in Sidney Harcave, The Russian Revolution of 1905, p. 200.
‡ Wolff’s Telegraph Office.
* The tsar’s “constitutional” manifesto, signed on Sunday evening, did not become widely known until Monday, October 31, 1905.
Freedom Is Born in the Tsar’s Empire
* This article was first published in Luxemburg’ Vorwärts column “The Revolution in Russia,” No. 259, November 4, 1905, under the title “Die Geburt der Freiheit im Zarenreich.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 616–20.
* Wollf’s Telegraphic Office.
† Although Luxemburg refers to this as a workers’ “council” in the German—as “des Arbeiterdeputiertenrates”—instead of using the Russian term “soviet,” the reference here is to that very institution.
The Revolution in Russia [November 5, 1905]
* These notes were published in Luxemburg’s column “The Revolution in Russia” in Vorwärts. The original title of the article is “Die Revolution in RuBland”—one of many articles that she published under the same title in 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 625–8.
† This is a reference to the Russian Monarchist Union, a far-right organization that was founded in February 1905 to provide support for the tsarist authorities. It especially targeted Jews for attack, which it held responsible for the revolution.
‡ Then known as Kishinev, a major city in what is now Moldova. At the time, it was the capital of the province of Moldavia, which the tsars had conquered from the Ottoman Turkish rulers of Romania.
The Murderous Cads of the “Constitutional State”
* These news posts were published in Luxemburg’s Vorwärts column “The Revolution in Russia,” in issue No. 261, November 7, 1905, under the title “Der Verfassungstaat der Mordbuben.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 629–32.
† A reference to a famous scene in the ballet La Bayadère by Marius Petipa, in which Solor (the warrior) enters into a dream-like euphoria in contemplating his lover, the temple maiden Nikiya, and sees her spirit amid the peaks of the Himalayas called “the kingdom of the shades.” It was first performed by the Imperial Ballet at the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St. Petersburg on February 4, 1877.
‡ Bułygin was fired as minister of the interior on October 30, 1905 (new style), after the government proved unable to contain the strike wave that swept Russia in September and October. The tsar appointed in his place a far more reactionary figure, Durnovo.
§ Durnovo served as minister of the interior from October 30, 1905 to April 22, 1906.
* Presumably, the Russian Monarchist Union.
* The right-of-center Constitutional Democratic Party was founded on October 12–18, 1905, through a merger of several liberal organizations. It was also known as the Party of People’s Freedom. Its politics mirrored those of the Russian Constitutional Democrats, or Kadeks.
† This refers to the Social Democratic Party of Finland (Soumen Sosialidemokraattinen Puolue), founded at Albo in 1899. Prior to 1903 it was known as the Finnish Labor Party (Suomen Työväenpuolue).
The Political Mass Strike
* This speech of November 7, 1905 was given at a public assembly in the polling office of Leipzig City Center—a so-called “House of the People.” It was first published in Vorwärts, No. 259, November 8, 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 633–7.
† The main reason being that the mass strike was generally associated with the political perspective of anarchism.
‡ Although Friedeberg began his career in the SPD associated with the moderate wing of the party, by 1904 he worked closely with the Free Association of German Trade Unions (FVdG), a left-wing (and more militant) rival to the SPD-associated Free Trade Unions. In 1904–1905 he strongly argued for the adoption of the mass strike by the SPD. He left the SPD in 1907 and became an adherent to what he called “anarcho-socialism.”
* The Fifth Congress of the Trade Unions of Germany took place in Cologne from May 22–7, 1905. A resolution at the Congress stated: “The Congress regards the general strike, as represented by anarchists and other people without any experience in the area of economic battle, as not worthy of discussion; furthermore, the congress warns the workers not to be delayed in the small, daily work of strengthening workers’ organizations by taking in and disseminating such ideas.”
* The Sino-Japanese war for domination in Korea ended with a peace favorable to Japan at the Treaty of Shimonseki on April 17, 1895, which forced China to recognize the independence of Korea and to cede Taiwan, the Pescadores Islands, and the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria to Japan. However, the combined intervention of Russia, France, and Germany—all worried about Japanese expansion in East Asia—forced Japan shortly afterward to return the Liaodong Peninsula to China.
† Luxemburg is referring to herself and other anti-imperialists within the Second International. As she put it in a letter to Jogiches of January 9, 1899: “Around 1895 a basic change occurred: the Japanese opened the Chinese doors and European politics, driven by capitalist and state interests, intruded into Asia. Constantinople moved into the background. Here the conflict between states, and with it the development of politics, had an extended field before it: the conquest and partition of all of Asia became the goal which European politics pursued.” See Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 1, p. 250.
‡ Marx spoke of the historic task of bourgeois society as the creation of a world market—and along with it, globally driven political and economic policies—from as early as the Communist Manifesto.
§ Luxemburg had been arguing since the late 1890s that events like the Sino-Japanese War signaled the beginning of a new series of military conflicts between states that would sooner or later upset the relatively peaceful conditions that Europe had enjoyed since the end of the Napoleonic Wars—a prescient forecast of what was to come in 1914.
¶ On November 14, 1897, Germany annexed the region of Jiaozhou, China. In a treaty on March 6, 1898, the Chinese government was forced to lease Jiaozhou Bay to the German Empire for ninety-nine years, as a naval base, and to concede the hinterland of Shandong.
* This refers firstly to the miners’ strike in the Ruhr from January 7 to February 19, 1905, consisting of around 215,000 miners. They demanded the eight-hour day, higher wages, guarantees for pit safety, and the elimination of all repression of political activity. Strikes and lockouts of 36,000 textile and tanner workers in Gera, Glauchau, Greiz, Meerane and other locations in Saxony-Thuringia in the fight for higher wages took place from October 20 to November 28, 1905. The executive of the Association of Textile Workers broke off the strike, without gains having been achieved.
† The silk weavers of Lyon rose up in April 1834, under the leadership of French proletarian secret organizations, demanding the banishment of poverty and the construction of a “social” republic. Parisian workers followed their examples. After intensive fights across the barricades, the rebels succumbed to the superior strength of the military.
‡ Under pressure from large workers’ demonstrations for a democratic voting law in the whole of Austria, and partly in response to the Russian Revolution, the Austrian government announced the introduction of universal and equal suffrage in November 1905.
§ The numerous parties of the Second International were largely modeled along the lines of the SPD’s Erfurt Program of 1891, which centered on the distinction between “minimum” and “maximum” demands.
¶ According to the Hamburger Echo of August 30, 1905, Karl Frohme lectured on the subject of “General Strike and Political Mass Strike” on August 29, 1905 at a meeting of the wages office for joiners. He strictly rejected the political mass strike by categorizing it as an anarchist method of struggle.
* The Antisocialist Laws in Germany, in effect from 1878 to 1890, banned dozens of socialist periodicals and book publishers. It did not however ban the SPD directly, and the party made rapid gains in membership and parliamentary representation after its suspension.
The Tsar Breaks His Word Again
* This unsigned report about proceedings in Russia was certainly penned by Luxemburg. This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 262, November 8, 1905, under the title “Neuer Wortbuch des Zaren.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 638–40.
* This town in Ukraine was known as Akkerman in Luxemburg’s time, which is how it is referred to in the original text.
A Conservative General as a “Revolutionary”
* This article, “Ein konservativer Generals ‘Revolutionist,’” published anonymously, first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 267, November 9, 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 641–5.
† The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 ended in September 1905 with Russia’s defeat. The Portsmouth Peace Treaty of September 5, 1905 solidified Japan’s dominance by formally acknowledging its control of Korea and southern Manchuria. The U.S. played a major role during the negotiations to end the war, especially in preventing Japan from obtaining reparations from the Russian Empire. The U.S. also had its conquest of the Philippines recognized by the major powers as a result of the treaty.
‡ According to newspaper reports, Wilhelm II telegraphed Nicholas II in summer 1902, after visiting the tsar in Tallinn, addressing the telegram to “the Admiral of the Atlantic Ocean and the Admiral of the Pacific Ocean.”
§ The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy was first formed in 1882 and was renewed periodically up to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Each of them promised support to the other two in the event of war.
¶ The German Navy arrived in Tangiers on March 31, 1905, demanding concessions for the German exploitation of raw materials. This was blocked by France, which claimed the same rights for itself, strengthening its position in Morocco. This provocation resulted in a crisis in international relations, ending with Germany’s almost complete isolation in 1906.
* This refers to the area around Memel (today Klaipeda) as well as East Prussia. Large portions of the latter were ultimately incorporated into the Soviet Union, at the end of World War II in 1945. It remains part of Russia today, known as the Kaliningrad Corridor.
† The Kaiser’s Berlin place of residence.
* At the time Schönstedt served as the Prussian minister of justice.
† A one-day mass strike had taken place in Hungary on September 15, 1905, including street demonstrations in which over 100,000 participated. In October–November 1905, forceful strikes and demonstrations for universal suffrage were initiated in Austria-Hungary.
‡ The Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary at the time was Francis Joseph I, who ruled the “dual monarchy” of Austria-Hungary until 1916.
* Fejérváry at the time was Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Hungary.
† Luxemburg is being ironic here by referring to a known reactionary who was a major architect of Germany’s imperialist expansion overseas.
‡ Cisleithania was the unofficial name given to the northern and western part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—that is, the section that did not consist of the Kingdom of Hungary or its possessions in the Balkans.
The Revolution in Russia [November 9, 1905]
* This article, “Die Revolution in Rußland,” is from Vorwärts, No. 263, November 9, 1905. It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 646–9.
† Dmitry Trepov had been chief of police in Moscow since 1896. In April 1905 he became chief of police of all Russia.
‡ Fyodorovna was the widow of Tsar Alexander III and mother of Nicholas II, the reigning monarch of the time.
§ A perforated container for sprinkling holy water.
¶ In Russian, Germogen; from the Greek, Hermogenes (born of Hermes).
** That is, students attending a gimnaziya, high school with a curriculum providing an academic education, rather than technical or vocational training.
†† Although the Union of Unions was founded by liberals such as P. N. Milyukov, some sections within it adopted more radical positions during the 1905 Revolution.
* The German adjective Hakatistisch (HKT-ist) is formed from the first initials of the last names of three men, Ferdinand von Hansemann, Hermann Kennemann, and Heinrich von Tildemann-Seeheim (Ha-, Ka-, Ti-). Those three Junkers, East Prussian owners of large landed estates, were encouraged by Wilhelm II in 1894 to found an expansionist-colonialist movement among German settler-colonists in areas now belonging to Poland, especially aimed at taking over lands owned by the Polish nobility in the German-occupied part of Poland. In 1899, the HKT-ists adopted the organizational name “German East Marches Society” (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein). Writers from the Ostmarkenverien regularly referred to Poles as “non-white” and posited a racial dichotomy between “white Germans” and “black Poles” and called for the ethnic cleansing of the latter. Many of its members later become supporters of the Nazis.
† Polish spelling, Katowice.
‡ Korfanty was a Polish activist and politician in Upper Silesia (then a part of Germany) of Christian-Democratic persuasion. In 1901, he became editor of Górnoślązak (The Upper Silesian), which advocated on behalf of the rights of Poles living in Germany from a conservative, antisocialist position.
§ For a detailed account of the election campaign in Upper Silesia, in the German-occupied part of Poland, see Luxemburg’s article “Zur Wahl in Kattowitz-Zabrze” (“On the Election in the Kattowitz-Zabrze Region,” Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, 564–6.
* In July 1904, a trial was held in Königsberg, capital of East Prussia near the border with the Russian empire, in which nine German Social Democrats were accused of “high treason” for smuggling anti-tsarist literature into the Russian empire. Among the defense lawyers was Karl Liebknecht, later to win fame together with Luxemburg as outstanding opponents of German participation in World War I. In the end, none of the defendants was convicted of “high treason,” and only three defendants were convicted of the minor charge of “membership in a secret society.” See Luxemburg’s article about the Königsberg trial, “Der russische Terroristen-Prozeß,” Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 494–8.
* Wirballen (now Virbalis in Lithuania) was a railroad town on the border between East Prussia and the Russian empire; it was a point at which the German rail network connected with the Russian rail network on the rail line going from Königsberg to St. Petersburg.
† Rieshitza appears to be the German spelling for a town near Dvinsk (Daugavpils), in the southeast of present-day Latvia. The Libau–Mitau–Rieshitza railroad ran from the Baltic port of Libau (now Liepāja, Latvia), its westernmost point, through Mitau (now Jelgava, Latvia), through Riga (the largest Baltic port in Latvia), to Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia), its southeastern endpoint. This railroad connected a few miles northeast of Dvinsk with the rail line to St. Petersburg.
‡ Grajewo was a Polish rail town in Russian-occupied Poland on the border with East Prussia, at a point where the rail network of Germany connected with that of the Russian empire.
The Revolution in Russia [November 10, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 264, November 29, 1905. Originally entitled “Die Revolution in Rußland,” it is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 650–3.
† Louis-Eugene Cavaignac was the French general who suppressed the June Uprising in France of 1848.
* Prince Eristo was a pen name of Aleksei Peshkov, better known by his other pen name, Maxim Gorky.
† Novaya Zhizn was the first legal Bolshevik daily newspaper. It was published from October to December 1905.
* Today’s Gdańsk.
* For more on the “HKT Movement,” see footnote *, on page 300, above.
After the Bankruptcy of Absolutism
* This article, whose title is “Nach dem Bankrott des Absoplutismus,” was not signed, but it is one in a series of lead editorials by Luxemburg as chief editor of Vorwärts, this one appearing in the issue No. 265 of November 11, 1905. A copy of it is found in RGASPI in Moscow, in collection 209, in which documents are archived that were intended for further volumes of the (incomplete) German-language Luxemburg Collected Works that was edited by Paul Frölich (in the 1920s) and authorized for publication by Clara Zetkin and Adolf Warski. It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 654–7.
† See Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx-Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 497.
* The “Mosse press” refers to the publications owned by a German newspaper mogul, Rudolf Mosse, who was allied with the liberal Free Thinkers. Mosse founded the Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily) in 1871, and in 1891, also in Berlin, the Volkszeitung (People’s Paper), which openly expressed agreement with the Free Thinkers on domestic issues.
* All of the tendencies of Russian Social Democracy up to 1905, from the Bundists to the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, argued that Russia’s economic and social backwardness meant that the demand for a democratic republic was the foremost task facing the workers’ movement—not the creation of a socialist society, which lay in the distant future. The demand for a republic had also been central to the approach taken earlier by most nineteenth-century West European socialists (including Marx), which held that the socialist class struggle could best be advanced within a democratic political context.
† The issue in dispute was over whether the struggle for a democratic republic will be led by the liberal bourgeoisie (as was the case with the 1848 Revolutions) or the proletariat. Luxemburg, like Lenin and Trotsky, held the latter position. For Luxemburg, the 1905 Russian Revolution proceeds from the point at which the 1848 Revolutions ended—not from where they began.
The Revolution in Russia [November 11, 1905]
* This article, “Die Revolution Rußland,” was first published in Vorwärts, No. 265, November 11, 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 658–60. This article is one of a series in which Luxemburg comments on the Kronstadt uprising of early-to-mid November 1905. In citing news reports about this over the course of roughly one week, she points out that the reports are often unclear and contradictory.
† Peterhof was the main residence of the tsar.
The Revolution in Russia [November 12, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 266, November 12, 1905, under the regular section heading used by Rosa Luxemburg: “Die Revolution in RuBland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 661–3.
† Luxemburg uses two different terms to describe what is often referred to in English as a single term, a “state of emergency.” “Kriegszustand” is often translated “state of war” and “Belagerungszustand” as “state of siege” or “state of occupation”.
* Luxemburg gives the phonetic spelling “Kishinyov,” which correctly reflects the Russian pronunciation of the city’s name, now called Chișinău.
* In the original, this is given as the German name of the town, Dabrowa.
† That is, from the Prussian-ruled part of Poland’s Upper Silesia.
Large Landowners and the Revolution
* This article, entitled in German as “Agrarier und Revolution,” first appeared in the November 14, 1905, issue of Vorwärts, No. 267, November 14, 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 664–7. This article was not signed. It belongs to the category of leading articles by the chief editor of Vorwärts.
† In October–November 1905, powerful strikes and street demonstrations occurred in Austria-Hungary, demanding universal suffrage. This movement, in which tens of thousands took part, spread across the regions of Galicia, Tyrol, Mähren, and Krain, among others. Slogans put forward by Social Democracy such as “We will speak Russian to them!” and “Long live the general strike!” were taken up. The unrest spread to the army and navy as well. The government promised in February 1906 to submit a bill for electoral reform to Parliament. An electoral law, which in many respects was quite restricted, was finally approved in January 1907.
* When Witte served as finance minister in the 1890s, he oversaw the introduction of a series of high tariffs in order to promote domestic Russian industry. The implementation of the new tariff on wheat was meant to discourage the import of American grain as part of a similar effort to promote the domestic economy. Unlike Russia at the time, American wheat production was becoming highly mechanized, resulting in a much lower cost of production than its Russian equivalent.
* That is, a migrant worker.
† That is, the right to form a union.
The Revolution in Russia [November 14, 1905]
* This article was published in Vorwärts, No. 267, November 14, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 668–71.
† From its founding in the thirteenth century to 1918, this important city in Estonia was known as Reval—which is the name used here by Luxemburg. We instead provide the modern name of the city.
* That is, the left-wing PPS and right-wing National Democrats, respectively.
† In the original, Luxemburg gives the German name of the region and river, the Weichsel. We provide here the modern name.
‡ In the original, the date of August 18 is given.
* In any case, since Novaya Zhizn was a newspaper of the Bolsheviks, it is hardly credible that it would have called for any “slaughter of the Jews.”
* Both of these monarchs were executed as a result of revolutions.
The Revolution in Russia [November 15, 1905]
* This article, originally entitled “Die Revolution in Rußland,” was published in Vorwärts, No. 268, November 15, 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 684–6.
† At the time Balfour was British prime minister, a position he held from 1902 until December 1905.
‡ The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time was Randall Davidson.
§ The Archbishop of Westminister at the time was Francis Bourne.
¶ Rus’ (Russia) was a liberal newspaper published in St. Petersburg from 1903 to 1908, with intervals under different names—Rus’ (Russia), Molva (Hearsay), and Dvadtsaty Vek (The Twentieth Century).
* Syn Otechestva was a newspaper published during parts of 1904 and 1905. It should not be confused with the literary journal of the same name published in the first half of the nineteenth century.
† Luxemburg’s reference to Petrov is to a leading advocate at the time of “Christian socialism.”
The Revolution in Russia [November 16, 1905]
* This article was first published in Vorwärts, No. 269, November 16, 1905. Originally entitled “Die Revolution in Rußland,” it is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 687–90.
* A reference to the Bolsheviks, who published Novaya Zhizn.
† Nachalo was a newspaper founded on November 13, 1905 by Leon Trotsky in alliance with a number of leading Mensheviks. It quickly became one of most popular publications among workers involved in the soviets. It should not be confused with an earlier publication under the same name, which briefly appeared in 1899 as a journal of the “legal Marxists” such as Pyotr Struve.
The Truth About Kronstadt
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 269, November 16, 1905, under the title “Die Wahrheit über Kronstadt.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 691–4.
† The Society of December 10 was founded by Louis Bonaparte in 1849 of lumpenproletarian elements with the aim of harassing and intimidating opponents of the government.
* The Potemkin mutiny began on June 15, 1905.
* John of Kronstad (in Russian, Ioann Kronshtadsky) was an orthodox priest of deeply conservative and anti-Semitic convictions. In 1903, he accused the Jews of being responsible for the pogrom launched against them in Kisinev. In the same year, he helped introduce Tsar Nicholas II to Rasputin. During and after the 1905 Revolution, his followers, called the Ionnitsy, assisted the pogroms launched by the Black Hundreds.
The State of Siege in Poland
* Although this article is unsigned, Luxemburg is clearly the author. A transcript can be found in the Moscow RGASPI, Find Number 209, documents archived for the unfinished German-language Collected Works of Rosa Luxemburg, published by Clara Zetkin and Adolf Warski and edited by Paul Fröhlich between 1923 and 1928. The article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 270, November 17, 1905, under the title “Der Belagerungszustand in Polen.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 695–8.
* The German East Marches Society (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein), or HKT, which advocated a policy of racist ethnic cleansing of Poles living in the German Empire.
† This is a contentious claim that many in Poland at the time—and not solely those in such groups as the PPS—would have taken sharp issue with.
* Luxemburg had earlier sought to demonstrate this claim through her 1897 work, The Industrial Development of Poland. See The Complete Works or Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. I: Economic Writings 1, edited by Peter Hudis (London and New York: Verso Books, 2013), pp. 1–78.
† Luxemburg is here referring to the right-wing National Democratic Party of Roman Dmowski, which was founded in 1897 as a vehicle for Polish nationalism.
‡ These are fake unions that serve the interest of the employers, not the workers.
§ Luxemburg no doubt has in mind the group’s virulent opposition to her SDKPiL. It should be noted, however, that the National Democratic Party also fiercely opposed left-wing tendencies that supported Polish national independence, such as the PPS.
The Revolution in Russia [November 17, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 270, November 17, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 699–702.
† This literally means “storm and drive.” That phrase was popularized by the literary movement in German of the late eighteenth century of the same name, which broke from neoclassical artistic forms by extolling emotions, individuality, and subjectivity over the prevailing order of rationalism.
‡ Reichstaat is generally analogous to the Anglo-American concept of “state-of-law,” although with an emphasis on moral rightness. It is this moral dimension—and the lack of it in the Prussian-German state—that Luxemburg is stressing.
* This is a reference to Novaya Zhyzn (New Life) and Nachalo (The Beginning), the former published by the Bolsheviks, the latter primarily by those grouped around Leon Trotsky.
† Chirikov joined the revolutionary movement in the 1880s and became an important exponent of Russian realism by 1900. In 1903, he authored the famous play The Jews and worked closely with Maxim Gorky during the 1905 Revolution. In The Eagle and the Hen, an eagle that is raised by chickens takes himself to be a chicken, until an owl convinces him to fly and spread his wings—much as the proletariat at first identifies with the liberals until it has the chance to “spread its wings” and fly on its own.
* Vyacheslav von Plehve was Russian interior minister from April 1902. A firm opponent of liberal hopes, he was assassinated by the Socialist Revolutionary Yegor Sazonov on July 28, 1904.
The Revolution in Russia [November 18, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 271, November 18, 1905, entitled “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 703–7.
† Peasant unrest flamed up from March to May 1902 in a number of regions, such as the provinces of Voronezh, Kutaisi, Poltava, and Kharkiv, before it was suppressed by force of arms.
‡ For an analysis of these peasant revolts of 1902, sparked largely by the inability of peasants to pay their arrears in taxes and payments for land allotments, see Sidney Hargrave’s The Russian Revolution, pp. 20ff.
§ Obolensky at the time was an Imperial Russian lieutenant general. In 1910, he was assassinated by revolutionaries in St. Petersburg.
¶ The sailors’ uprising took place in Vladivostok on November 12 and 13, 1905 and was beaten down by tsarist troops.
** The unprecedented series of peasant revolts in 1905 included 219 peasant uprisings in October, 796 uprisings in November, and 575 uprisings in December.
* This bracketed comment is made by the editors of the Gesammelte Werke, and refers to the original.
* This was the most important soviet during the Russian Revolution. Here, as elsewhere in her writings of 1905, Luxemburg refers to the institution by its German name—Arbeiterräte—instead of using the Russian term soviet.
The Revolution in Russia [November 19, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 272, November 19, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by George Shriver) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 708–9.
† Izvestia was the newspaper published by the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.
‡ That is, the soviet.
§ That is, the SDKPiL.
¶ A combined passenger and freight train.
* Luxemburg’s exclamation point.
† Harbin is a major city in Manchuria. Russia had sent a sizable military force into the region during the Russo-Japanese War.
The Revolution in Russia [November 21, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 273, November 21, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, 710–13.
† This publication should not be confused with the more recent paper called Novoye Vremya, which has been published in Russian and German since 1991.
‡ Intended as a means to end social stratification.
§ A district made up of five to ten villages.
* Luxemburg develops this point in much greater detail in her Introduction to Political Economy and her anthropological and ethnographic studies on the developing world, composed when she was taught at the SPD’s school in Berlin from 1907 to 1914. See The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. I: Economic Writings 1, pp. 146–300.
† Ostelbien or East Elbia refers to the German territories to the east of the Elbe river, especially the Prussian lands of Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Silesia, which had been shaped by a long history of conservatism, serfdom, and Protestantism.
‡ Following its defeat by Napoleon in 1806, Prussia embarked on a series of military, administrative, and social reforms, one of which was the abolition of serfdom throughout the kingdom. Peasants were allowed to appropriate lands on which they worked, provided they paid for it—which most could not do. As a result, many were forced to surrender control of their land to absentee landlords, which made the situation worse than before.
* A large landed estate or ranch, as in ancient Rome or more recently in Spain or Latin America, typically worked by slaves or serfs.
The Revolution in Russia [November 22, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 274, November 22, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 714–16.
† A reference to Alexander Bułygin’s shaping of the so-called “Bułygin Constitution” in response to the Revolution of 1905.
‡ French king Louis XVI (1754–93), whose absolutist regime was overthrown during the French Revolution of 1789–1799. He was executed in 1793.
* Kurienwahlrecht, or election by curia, was used in the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1861–1907 as the legal basis of dividing the electorate into different classes. Luxemburg uses this term to illustrate that this system gives a structural advantage to the traditional elites and thus denigrates democratic aspirations.
† Another reference to France’s last monarch, King Louis XVI of France, who came to be seen by many in the French population as the epitome of tyranny.
* The Portsmouth Conference of 1905 ended the war without providing for reparations, as initially demanded by both China and Japan.
The Revolution in Russia [November 24, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 275, November 24, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 717–20.
† Luxemburg uses Konstituante, rather than konstituierende Versammlung, to make a direct reference to the National Constituent Assembly in France, in July 1789, in German called die Konstituante. It ended the traditional system that gave equal weight to the three social estates (clergy, nobility, and the so-called third estate) in the assembly. This traditional system of pre-revolutionary France amounted to the third estate being at a huge structural disadvantage, despite representing by far the largest amount of people.
* By using this metaphor, Luxemburg not merely conceptualizes the role of liberals as mercenaries for the status quo, but frames them as a special kind of “owned slaves” analogous to the Mamelukes in the Islamic empires in the Middle East and India; she wants the reader to know that they are dangerous slaves, who could seize power.
* This refers to the Finnish Labor Party, which changed its name to the Social Democratic Party in 1903. Its leftwing was led by O. Kuusinen and Y. Sirola. Luxemburg later met with some of its leaders during her stay in Finland in 1906.
* Luxemburg is referring to the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt, produced by the newspaper publisher Rudolf Mosse and holding close links to the liberal Free Thinkers’ Association (Freisinnige Vereinigung). “Auntie Voß” is the name for the Vossische Zeitung, a daily liberal-bourgeois paper. The name derives from the founding publisher and bookseller Christian Friedrich Voß.
The Solution to the Problem
* This article was first published in Die Gleichheit, No. 24, November 24, 1905, pp. 139–40, with the German title “Die Lösung der Frage.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 619–22.
† Although the first empire-wide Social Democratic party was not established in Russia until 1897 (with the Jewish Bund) and the RSDRP in 1898, earlier Social Democratic parties and groupings existed on a regional and local basis, such as the Proletariat I and II parties (founded in 1882 and 1888, respectively) and the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class (founded in 1895). Informal Social Democratic groupings in the form of study circles and other formations also existed by the late 1880s.
* Among which were the Black Hundreds.
The Revolution in Russia [November 25, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 276, November 25, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 721–4.
† The ellipsis is in Luxemburg’s original.
* The Party of Trade and Industry was founded in 1905 after the publication of the tsar’s manifesto on October 30 (New Style). It was a counter-revolutionary party representing big money in Russia’s central industrial regions, and collapsed in 1906.
† Kuzmich had been appointed chief of the port of Saint Petersburg shortly before this. In May 1906, he was killed in an act of revolutionary terror.
* Luxemburg suggests that the police were using agent provocateurs to incite violence.
The Revolution in Russia [November 26, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 277, November 26, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 725–7.
† Luxemburg uses the term Friedensgericht at this point, denoting the type of court, rather than specifying which type of judge would hear such cases. “Justice of the peace” is, however, an adequate translation for the level of the judiciary that Luxemburg is describing.
* On October 23, 1905, Durnovo succeeded Bułygin as interior minister. He was deeply conservative and opposed any democratic opening. He left office in 1906 after the departure of Witte from the government. Later, in 1914, he sent the tsar a memorandum that predicted the outcome of World War I with remarkable accuracy: “A general European war is mortally dangerous both for Russia and Germany, no matter who wins … [T]here must inevitably break out in the defeated country a social revolution which, by the very nature of things, will spread to the country of the victor … An especially favorable soil for social upheavals is found in Russia, where the masses undoubtedly profess, unconsciously, the principles of socialism.”
* Russia at the time was still in competition with Japan over control of Manchuria and had sent a sizable ground force into the region near the end of the Russo-Japanese War. It was one of the factors the led the Japanese government, concerned that its troops were stretched too thin in the area, to agree to the settlement that ended the war.
† The editors of Vorwärts inserted the sentence in parentheses into the original article.
‡ At the time, Linevich was adjutant general of the Imperial Russian Army in the Far East.
The Revolution in Russia [November 28, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 278, November 28, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 728–30.
† Kettling is a police tactic for controlling demonstrators by corralling them in a circle with but one way out—the one controlled by the police.
Victorious Days for the Constitutional Manifesto
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 278, November 28, 1905, under the title “Die Siegestage des Verfassungsmanifestes.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 731–41.
† Luxemburg published this emotional eyewitness account (taken from the publication Rus’) as a supplement to her column “The Revolution in Russia.” Shortly after she became editor-in-chief of Vorwärts, she resolved (on November 1, 1905) to use supplements of the paper for more popular, middlebrow essays.
‡ A member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Balmashov assassinated Internal Affairs Minister Dmitry Sipyagin on April 2, 1902. After refusing to ask for clemency, on the grounds that “the method of combating a terrorist seems to me inhumane and cruel, but it’s inevitable with the current regime,” he was executed in May 1903.
* This refers to the Russian losses incurred in the Russo-Japanese War between January 1904 and September 1905.
* A provincial executive.
† A reference to Vyacheslav von Plehve, director of the police of Imperial Russia and one of the most reactionary of government ministers. He was assassinated by a member of the SR Combat Group in 1904.
* The Oprichnina was a murderous group of government agents, similar to a secret police organization, used by Ivan the Terrible between 1565 and 1572, aimed at breaking the power of the boyars, the old families of the Russian nobility. Individual members of the Oprichnina were called Oprichniks.
* A ceremonial canopy of stone, metal, or fabric, over an altar, throne, or doorway.
† Grand Duke Sergei Romanov was the uncle of Nicholas II and an influential figure in the government. He was an extremely conservative figure who was responsible for evicting 20,000 Jews from Moscow. In 1905 he moved into the ornate Neskuchnoye Palace.
* The “Trepov system” is named after Dimitri Feodorovich Trepov, head of the Moscow Police, governor-general of Petersburg, as well as Russian assistant interior minister. He benefited from the support of Tsar Nicholas II and was notorious for his hardline approach to any protesters. During the revolution of 1905, Trepov promoted repressive measures, which, however, failed to contain the revolutionary momentum.
The Revolution in Russia [November 29, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 279, November 29, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 742–4.
* Pulemyot pioneered such graphic elements as montage, which later proved highly influential in the work of such pathbreaking filmmakers as Sergei Eisenstein.
The Revolution in Russia [November 30, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 280, November 30, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 745–7.
† This is a rather remarkable statement, given the pride which most German socialists had toward their highly organized party and trade union movement—and how much and how often they looked down upon their Russian brethren for being “backward” and “unorganized.” The point was sure to be noticed by many readers of Vorwärts.
* Probably Hirsch’s Office, a news agency
* Actually, it began publication a few days earlier, on November 13, as Luxemburg had earlier reported.
Lieutenant Schmidt
* This unsigned article belongs to the lead articles written by Luxemburg as chief editor of Vorwärts. It first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 281, December 1, 1905. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 748–52.
† This French loanword means “the lowest class of vulgar people.” This is a typical technique in her writings on the 1905 Russian Revolution—taking terms that were normally used in an abusive way against the proletariat and using them instead against the tsarist government or its supporters.
‡ These were main theaters of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1905.
§ Luxemburg is making a conscious reference to a number of leaders of the French Revolution who were given the titles of “Tribune of the People” or “Plebeian Tribunes.” These in turn are modern variants of the Latin Tribunus plebis, which was the first office of the Roman state open to the lower classes (known as plebeians). During the Roman Republic it was the most important check on the power of the Roman Senate.
* As often occurs in these articles which cite press dispatches and reports on events relevant to the 1905 Revolution, Luxemburg here inserts a half-sentence of her own into Schmidt’s comments.
* On March 10, 1906, issue No. 58 of Vorwärts published two columns of detailed notes that Lieutenant Schmidt had made during his time spent in the Casemate Prison in Fort Oshakiv awaiting the execution of his death sentence. These included the following editorial comment: “According to this self-portrait, Lieutenant Schmidt appears to have been more of a utopian idealist, than a clear thinking and decisive man of action.” People aiming at revenge would grow up out of his blood, which (as Schmidt wrote) “no longer feel any false sentimentality toward a bestial opponent.” Issue No. 67 of Vorwärts on March 21, 1906 reprinted the report from the Den [The Day], about Schmidt’s execution: “Lieutenant Schmidt alongside the sailors Chastnikov, Gladkov, and Antonenko was shot at 4 a.m., by a firing squad of sixty sailors from the Terets, a gunboat; these sailors were in turn backed up by a platoon of infantry. Schmidt was very composed and asked his defense counsel to take down as fact that he’d never given men orders to shoot, and therefore did not have any human lives on his conscience. He spent his final hours writing letters to his sister, Frau Isbach, and to his sons. The execution was carried out on the Island of Beresand, when dusk was already falling. Schmidt walked quickly toward the place of execution and requested that no hood should be put over his face, nor that his hands should be tied to the post. He then said a moving farewell to the sailors and soldiers and shouted, ‘A long life to you! Fire!’ Schmidt only fell at the third volley of bullets. The corpses of the four executed were laid in prepared coffins and were buried hastily, right there and then.”
* Here Luxemburg is referring to Kronstadt, located thirty kilometers west of Petersburg—not to be confused with the Romanian city of Brașov, which was still referred to as Kronstadt in German during Luxemburg’s lifetime.
The Revolution in Russia [December 2, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 282, December 2, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 753–6.
* Cuirassier refers to an armored cavalry detachment. The term comes from the French word “cuirasse,” which refers to the breastplate of armor worn by the cavalrymen. Hussars refers to members of a light cavalry.
* The Fortress was founded in the fourteenth century. After the area came under Russian control under Peter the Great (in 1702), it became a high-security prison.
† October 30 in new style.
The Revolution in Russia [December 3, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 283, December 3, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 757–60.
† ’
* In the German, the word used is “beifallen,” in the sense of occur to, “It would not occur to them.”
* Edmund Burke was a prominent opponent of the French Revolution of 1789. Luxemburg is suggesting that British liberalism may well respond to the 1905 Revolution as Russian liberals did—by distancing themselves from it.
† Fortnightly Review was an influential English magazine founded in 1865 by Anthony Trollope and other prominent intellectual figures. It offered literary and political pieces from a conservative as well as liberal perspective until 1954, when it ceased publication.
* In the article, Luxemburg provides a German translation of the following statement in Fortnightly Review. We provide here the English original.
† We have been unable to identity the author who used the pseudonym of Perseus.
The Revolution in Russia [December 5, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 284, December 5, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 761–4.
* The central bureau of the Second International.
The Revolution in Russia [December 6, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 285, December 6, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 765–9.
† A liberal, Berlin-based newspaper.
* Kiev is, of course, in Ukraine. Luxemburg never acknowledged, however, calls for Ukrainian independence and self-determination, and repeatedly referred to it as Russian.
* This is a Russian term meaning military units of 100 men.
† At the time Trepov was considered among the most reactionary members of the government; he regularly urged Nicholas II to use violent measures against protesters. Although his removal from power was one of the promises of the October Manifesto, he was appointed by Nicholas II as commander of the imperial palace.
‡ When Gapon returned to Russia at the end of 1905, he entered into discussions with the government that were mediated by Pyotr Struve. The SR party, with which Gapon had earlier had friendly relations, now began to denounce him.
§ This parenthetical sentence was introduced into the article by the editors of Vorwärts.
The Political Mass Strike
* This was given as a speech by Luxemburg to a “Meeting of the People” sponsored by Social Democratic Women of Berlin. It was first published, based on as newspaper report, in Vorwärts, No. 287, December 8, 1905, under the title “Der politische Massenstreik.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 770–4.
† Since this speech is presented as taken down by a reporter, in several instances Luxemburg is referred to in the third person.
‡ The May 1905 Trade Union Congress not only opposed adopting the strategy of mass strike but also forbid its discussion.
§ Der Grundstein was a journal for masons, quarrymen, and related professions, published fortnightly in Hamburg from October 1, 1875.
* Luxemburg will later use this exact formulation in The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions, in 1906. See The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. IV: Political Writings 2 (London and New York: Verso Books, forthcoming).
† The foreign policy adopted by Germany after 1891, which stressed the need for Germany to develop as an international power and secure colonies in the developing world. It represented a rejection of Bismarck’s earlier Realpolitik, based on ensuring a stable balance of power between the major nation-states.
‡ A prescient forecast of what was to come with World War I.
§ Kiautschou, on the southern coast of Shandong Peninsular in China, became a German leased territory seized from China in 1898.
* This refers to those in the German government and military who had concluded that the policy of Weltpolitik could succeed only if Germany underwent a massive build-up of its naval forces—even if that should risk war with other European powers.
† In November and December 1905, a struggle involving tens of thousands of participants took place in Saxony, against the then-current three-class suffrage system, and for the implementation of a democratic voting system with which to elect the state parliament. Bloody clashes with the police took place in Dresden.
‡ Luxemburg’s comment is clearly aimed against reformist elements in the Second International, including but not restricted to Bernstein, who dismissed the importance of this critical Marxian concept. In doing so, she is pointing to the permanent character of the ongoing Russian Revolution.
* Erich Mühsam had polemicized against Luxemburg from an anarchist standpoint. He was later to be one of the main leaders of the ill-fated Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919.
The Revolution in Russia [December 7, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 286, December 7, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 775–8.
* Aranjuez, in central Spain, was the site of a palatial residence of the King of Spain in the eighteenth century. In 1808 it was the site of the Mutiny of Aranjuez, a popular uprising against King Charles IV, which was largely a response to an economic crisis that resulted in a sharp drop of industrial production.
† From Hirsch’s Office, a press agency.
* A major concert hall, which hosted performances by Gustav Mahler and many other important composers.
The Revolution in Russia [December 8, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 287, December 8, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 779–81.
† Pyotr Nikolayevich Durnovo, minister of the interior, had banned the All-Russian Association of Post and Telegraph Employees. In response, the congress of the association called a protest strike on November 15.
The Revolution in Russia [December 9, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 288, December 9, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 782–5.
* Gapon fled abroad in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday and was at first welcomed by numerous Russian revolutionaries living in exile (such as Plekhanov, Lenin, and Kropotkin). He also developed close ties with the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Upon his return to Russia at the end of 1905, however, he contacted the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, and offered his services to them. While his motives for doing so are unclear, he may have thought that re-establishing a connection with the regime could help the workers’ cause. He was executed shortly after his return to Russia, in March 1906, by the SR.
* Roman saying: “Hannibal is at the Gates!”
The Revolution in Russia [December 10, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 289, December 10, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 786–7.
Revolutionary Days in Moscow
* Although no name appeared with this article, Luxemburg was most probably the author. Its content, diction, and the use of eyewitness accounts is very similar to what is contained in her other writings of the period in Vorwärts. The article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 289, December 10, 1905, under the title “Die Revolutionstage in Moskau.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 788–92.
† The rest of this article is a summary of a report Luxemburg received from a participant in the Moscow protests.
* Cheap clothing worn by the Russian poor.
* Since this consists of Luxemburg’s summary of a report, she is not referring to herself here. She did not leave Germany for Russia until the very end of 1905.
† Luxemburg is, again, not referring to herself, but rather providing an image of the events occurring in the mass meetings.
* The Bolsheviks were the majority faction of the RSDRP, while the minority faction the Mensheviks.
The Revolution in Russia [December 12, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 290, December 12, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 793–5.
The Revolution in Russia [December 13, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 291, December 13, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 796–8.
* The friend was Mariya Oshanina, a leading Russian Populist who was a member of the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) in the early 1880s and the leading woman theoretician of the Populists.
† See Lopatin’s “Letter to Mariya Oshanina,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 26 (New York: International Publishers, 1990), p. 591–3. Lopatin was one of the first Marxists in Russia, having studied Marx’s work as early as 1868. He met with Marx in 1870 and assisted in the translation into Russian of Volume One of Capital. Closely associated with the Populist movement, Lopatin was exiled to Siberia after his return to Russia, but escaped in 1883 and made his way to Paris and then London, where he met with Engels.
The Revolution in Russia [December 14, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 292, December 14, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 799–801.
* Shortly after penning these lines, Gapon returned to Russia.
The Revolution in Russia [December 15, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 293, December 15, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 802–4.
The Revolution in Russia [December 16, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 294, December 16, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 805–7.
† This parenthetical sentence was introduced in the original by the editors of Vorwärts.
* This parenthetical phrase was introduced in the original by the editors of Vorwärts.
The Revolution in Russia [December 17, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 295, December 17, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 808–10.
† That is, the RSDRP.
‡ This mandated that serfs must pay the landowner for their allocation of land in a series of redemption payments, which, in turn, were used to compensate the landowners with bonds. Seventy-five percent of the total sum would be advanced by the government to the landowner and peasants would repay the money plus interest. These payments were cancelled in 1907.
§ This parenthetical phrase was introduced in the original by the editors of Vorwärts. The claim was far from accurate.
* This parenthetical phrase was introduced in the original by the editors of Vorwärts.
The Truth About Sevastopol
* This unsigned article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 295, December 17, 1905, entitled “Die Wahrheit über Sewastopol.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 811–18.
* The St. Andrews flag, consisting of intersecting blue crosses against a white background, had been the official flag of the Russian Navy since 1712. It was eliminated following the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1918.
† A pood is an old Russian measurement, roughly equal to 16.38 kilograms.
The Revolution in Russia [December 19, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 296, December 19, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 819–23.
† Several times in this article Luxemburg uses the term “Schwarzen Banden” (Black Bands), but it is clear from the context that she is referring to the reactionary groupings known as the Black Hundreds.
* A mitrailleuse is a type of volley gun with multiple rifle barrels that can fire either multiple rounds at once or several rounds in rapid succession. It was originally invented in Belgium.
† This was not accurate; at the time, there were a considerable number of anarchists in Russia, even if far fewer than the number of Marxists. For a study of the role played by the anarchists in the 1905 Revolution, see Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2005).
* A sizable section of the German Social Democratic Party actually consisted of anarchists until 1895, when their tendency (known as “Die Junge”) was expelled from it.
† The ellipsis is contained in the original text of Luxemburg; it does not represent material that was removed from publication.
The Revolution in Russia [December 20, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 297, December 20, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 824–7.
The Revolution in Russia [December 20, 1905]
* This article was first published in the Warsaw-based Polish periodical Trybuna Ludowa (Tribune of the People) on December 20, 1905, under the title “Rewolucja w Rosji” (The Revolution in Russia). Trybuna Ludowa was a legal publication during December 1905, after Tsar Nicholas II’s October Manifesto promised constitutional reforms in the midst of the general strike of October 1905. But that freedom of the press did not last long, coming to an end early in 1906. Many years later, in 1959, this article was reprinted in a Polish selection of Luxemburg’s writings (Wybór Pism—Selected Works). A German version of the article, not accompanied by any date, appeared in Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2, pp. 5–10. It is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from the Polish original.
Before Decisive Battle
* Although no name is identified with this article, it is clearly by Luxemburg. The article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 298, December 21, 1905, entitled “Vor der Entscheidungsschlacht.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 828–31.
† Nachalo, founded by Alexander Parvus, Julius Martov, and Leon Trotsky, was de facto Trotsky’s newspaper. The lead article from Nachalo quoted here can therefore be taken as being written by Trotsky. See Bernd Florath, “‘Es ist ein Lust zu leben!’ Rosa Luxemburg als Redakteurin des sozialdemokratischen Vorwärts über die russische Revolution 1905,” in Lesearten marxistischer Theorie mit Beiträgen über Anton Ackermann, Otto Bauer, Ferdinand Lassalle, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Plechanow, edited by Wladislaw Hedeler (Berlin: Helle Panke, 1996).
* This pejorative Italian word means an unleashed, lawless mob of soldiers.
* The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre took place in 1572 with targeted assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence directed against French Calvinist Protestants (the Huguenots).
The Revolution in Russia [December 21, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 298, December 21, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 832–6.
† That is, a line of increased repression.
‡ Severny Golos was a legal daily newspaper of the RDSRP that began publication in St. Petersburg on December 19, 1905. It was jointly edited by the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The tsarist government closed it down after its third issue, on December 21, 1905.
* Plekhanov was one of the few leaders of the Russian Marxist movement not to return to Russia during the 1905 Revolution.
† Although still a committed Marxist, Zasulich’s active involvement in revolutionary politics had already begun to wane by the end of 1905.
* This is because a one-chamber system, as against a four-chamber system that weighs votes differently depending on social status and class, comes closest to the democratic principle of “one man, one vote.”
† Most of Finland was a part of the Kingdom of Sweden from the thirteenth century to 1809, when the Finnish-speaking areas of Sweden were ceded to the Russian Empire. A significant and influential Swedish-speaking minority remained. Swedish was the language of the cultural and educational elite well into the 1920s.
‡ That is, a parliament designed to thwart popular representation and ensure the dominance of the ruling classes.
* Livonia, now split between Latvia and Estonia, possessed a substantial German-speaking ethnic minority since the Middle Ages. They formed an important part of the ruling class of Livonia, which explains their support for tsarism and opposition to the Russian Revolution.
The Revolution in Russia [December 22, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 299, December 22, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 837–8.
† Borba was published by the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
* Pavel Milyukov was the leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (CD), known colloquially as “the Cadets,” a liberal party committed at first to a constitutional monarchy and later to a republic. Members included progressive landowners, representatives from the bourgeoisie, and members of the intelligentsia. Milyukov was also instrumental in helping form the Union of Unions in 1905, but the group began to come apart at the end of 1905 over conflicts between liberal and more radical elements.
The Revolution in Russia [December 23, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 300, December 23, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 839–41.
* Luxemburg is referring to the fact that many of the ethnic Germans living in the area were large landowners.
The Germans in the Baltic Provinces
* This article is unsigned, but is most probably from Luxemburg. It is similar in structure to her column “The Revolution in Russia,” through which she often informed her readers about revolutionary events in Riga, and about the problems of nationalism. The article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 300, December 23, 1905, entitled “Die Deutschen in den Ostseeprovinzen.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 842–4.
* The Helots were the slave class of ancient Sparta.
* The writer is here ironically comparing justice in this area to an Islamic “Qadi” Court, which was responsible for the application of Islamic law at the bequest of the Caliph. The comparison is somewhat misleading, however, since over time Qadi judges enjoyed a great degree of autonomy—largely because the law applied by them was not seen as the creation of the ruler or Caliph, but rather as derived from Islamic texts that required close and careful debate and interpretation.
The Revolution in Russia [December 24, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 301, December 24, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 851–6.
† The Polish strike occurred on January 28, 1905.
‡ On January 29, 1905, faced with the growing strike movement, the tsarist government formed the Shidlovsky Commission. According to the official press release, it was intended to resolve the causes of the popular dissatisfaction. Vladimir Kokovtsov was finance minister in Sergei Witte’s cabinet from February 5 to October 24, 1905.
* That is, the red flag of revolution.
† Plekhanov had stated years earlier: “To conclude, I repeat and emphasize: the revolutionary movement in Russia will triumph as a workers’ movement, or it will never triumph.” See Protokoll des Internationalen Arbeiter-Congresses zu Paris. Abgehalten vom 14. bis 20 Juli 1889 (Nürnberg: Wörlein, 1890), p. 63.
* The document was less than accurate here, since the two delegates represented not just English but British socialism. Keir Hardie was himself of Scottish origin.
† See Archivalische Forschungen zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Vol. 2/V: Die Russische Revolution von 1905–1907 im Spiegel der deutschen Presse, edited by Leo Stern (Berlin: Rütten & Loening 1961), p. 1137. See also Bureau Socialiste International. Comptes Rendus des Réunions Manifestes et Circulaires. Vol. I 1900–1907, edited by Georges Haupt (Paris: La Haye, 1969).
* We have reproduced here Luxemburg’s idiosyncratic literary technique of placing an exclamation mark before a piece of information. She does this to warn her readers that the information she has just provided comes from a semi-official report and should therefore be treated with skepticism.
The Revolution in Russia [December 28, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 302, December 28, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 857–61. It is based on reports from December 23 to 27, 1905. Vorwärts had stated on December 24, 1905, that the next issue would be published on December 28.
† An “infernal machine” was a term used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a type of explosive device used for military or terrorist purposes and detonated by a timer or sensor.
* Timofei Prokhorov and Konstantin Prokhorov were co-owners of the famous Three Mountains Factory in Moscow. For more on this, see Boris B. Gorshkov, Russia’s Factory Children: State, Society, and Law, 1800–1917 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), p. 161.
* To authentically convey Luxemburg’s original tone, we have used the archaic term “Mohammedans” here, as Luxemburg writes “die Mohamedaner” at this point in her original text.
* That is, Tsar Nicholas II.
The Revolution in Russia [December 29, 1905]
* This article first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 303, December 29, 1905, under the title “Die Revolution in Rußland.” It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 862–4. The article is based on reports received until December 28, 1905, the date that she left for Warsaw in order to take part in the revolution there.
New Year, New Struggles
* Although no name is printed below this article, it is nevertheless one of the leading articles written by Luxemburg as chief editor of Vorwärts, before her departure to Warsaw. It first appeared in Vorwärts, No. 305, December 31, 1905, entitled “Neues Jahre, neue Kämpfe. It is translated (by Henry Holland) from Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 6, pp. 865–9.
† Today this is known as Shenyang.
* In February 1905, Italy’s railroad employees carried out their work according to a partially obsolete code of railroad regulations in order to prevent a prohibition on the right to strike. Traffic moved very slowly and trade was paralyzed. On March 4, 1905, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolotti resigned for health reasons. The new Prime Minister, Alesandro Fortis, put a bill before parliament, which would give the railroad workers the status of civil servants, thereby removing their right to strike. On April 17, 1905, a railroad strike was declared against the parliamentary bill, in which all railroad workers participated. On April 21, 1905, work began again.
† This refers to the period 1899–1902, when Alexandre Millerand, then a moderate socialist, joined the French government as minister of commerce. His acceptance of a position in a capitalist government proved extremely controversial and was sharply denounced at the time by Luxemburg and other leftist elements in the Second International.
‡ The annual congress of the English and Welsh trade unions met from September 4 to September 8, in Staffordshire.
* Hamburg’s city-state parliament, the senate (the German name is Der Senat der Hamburger Bürgerschaft), had introduced a proposal to change the voting law on May 4, 1905, so that voters in Hamburg elections would be classified into three groups according to their incomes. This meant the introduction of a three-tier voting system. The justification for the proposal specifically emphasized that this would be a counterweight to the increasing number of Social Democratic votes. Before the decisive parliamentary vote on this proposal at the end of January 1906, on January 17, 80,000 Hamburg workers downed tools, responding to a call by Social Democrats. The altered voting law was passed on January 31, 1906, by a parliamentary majority.
A Year of Struggle
* This article first appeared in Czerwony Sztandar, No. 33, December 31, 1905, pp. 1–2. Its title in Polish is “Rok walki.” It is translated (by George Shriver and Alicja Mann) from the Polish original.
* The day Nicholas II issued his constitutional manifesto.
† This is a reference to the arrest of the St. Petersburg Council (Soviet) of Workers’ Deputies on December 3, 1905, with approximately 250 persons being detained, many of them being put on trial a year later. See the 1906 speech in defense of the Soviet by its chairman, Leon Trotsky, in his historical account, 1905 (New York: Random House, 1971).