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Episode 10.85: The German Revolution

At the core of Bolshevik communist ideology was a faith that they were in the vanguard of an international socialist revolution, that World War I would mark the death of the old world of capitalist imperialism, and the birth of a new world, of global socialism. In their minds, the October Revolution was akin to a small army of Russians winning control of the key hill adjacent to an important battlefield. Yes, it was vital and necessary that they hold that hill, but the main battlefield was off in the west, in places like France and Britain and Germany. These more technologically and economically advanced nations would provide the mass proletarian army envisioned by revolutionary Marxism, an army that would storm and overwhelm the forces of capitalist imperialism everywhere. So in the background of all Bolshevik thinking throughout 1917 and 1918 was the idea that all they needed to do was hold their hill, and maybe provide some covering fire for their comrades in the west, so that they could go off and win the greater battle. The notion that the Russians might be left to fight alone was not only not a part of the larger plan, but it was assumed to be effectively synonymous with their own final defeat. Lenin and company needed proletarian victory in the west to secure their own position in Russia.

As the one year anniversary of the October Revolution came around in the autumn of 1918, communist leaders in Moscow thus looked eagerly to events in central Europe, especially in Germany. The collapse of the Central Powers and the end of World War I would surely mark the arrival of the proletarian reinforcements they had been waiting for. And that is what we are going to talk about today. Because the events in Germany between October 1918 and January 1919 are the decisive moments when the theory that radical socialist revolution would soon be sweeping across Europe was decisively contradicted by the reality of events — events that are going to force the Russians to completely rethink and reimagine what it is that they are up to, as they realize that they are going to have to do it alone.

So to set up the fault lines of the coming German Revolution, we need to talk about the fracturing of the German Social Democratic Party, the SPD. Now by the time World War I broke out, the SPD was the model socialist political party. It was by far the largest, strongest, and best organized socialist party in Europe. It was the leading element of international socialism, and a backbone of the Second International. Domestically, in the 1912 Reichstag elections, the SPD won the largest number of seats — not an outright majority, but they were still the biggest single party. But then as we discussed in Episode 10.55, on August 4th, 1914, the leaders of the SPD decided to support the German war effort, whereupon all the other socialist parties in Europe supported their own respective national war efforts, precipitating the breakdown of the Second international.

But there was inside Germany a faction of socialists who held to the principles of opposition to imperialist wars. Aghast at the betrayal of the SPD, gathered for the first time the very next day, to organize a group that would maintain fidelity to the repeatedly endorsed principles of international proletarian solidarity.

This group would become known to history as the Spartacus Group, taking their name from a guy we talked about way back in Episode 36 of the History of Rome, I Am Spartacus.

As the Spartacus group organizes itself. I want to briefly highlight three leaders in particular: Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and Karl Liebknecht.

We’ll start with the most famous of the three, Rosa Luxemburg, who has already made some cameos in our series on the Russian Revolution. 43 years old when World War I broke out, Luxemburg was a long standing force in international socialism. Born into a Jewish family in the Russian controlled part of Poland, she radicalized early, and was already attending underground reading groups by the time she was 15 years old. This put her on the radar of the Okhrana, and in 1889, she fled to Switzerland at the age of 18. There, she enrolled in the University of Zurich, where she was one of the only women in a nearly all-male student body. She studied economics and political science, and earned a doctorate in 1897 in political economy.

But mostly, Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist revolutionary. She entered the socialist scene and became acquainted with all the heavy hitters of the day, and then became the principal theoretician of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. She attended her first international socialist gathering in 1893. Over the years, Luxemburg developed an idiosyncratic version of Marxism that combined a belief in the inevitable collapse of capitalism, the necessity of revolution to deliver the final blow, the priority of class interests over national interests or gender interests, and a commitment to mass struggle, especially in the form of the general strike. Her 1898 pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution, marked Luxemburg as one of the most gifted and eloquent opponents of Edward Bernstein’s revisionist version of Marxism.

Throughout the pre-war years, Luxemburg zealously engaged in intra-socialist debates, always attacking everyone from the position of the revolutionary left. She bounced in and out of various prisons, and after moving to Germany, served as a teacher for the SPD, where she instructed, among others, a rising star in the party named Friedrich Ebert.

During these years, Luxemburg met and befriended the second person I want to highlight today, Clara Zetkin. 14 years older than her young friend Luxemburg, she too had radicalized as a student, and then departed for Switzerland and Paris on account of Bismarck’s ban on socialist activities in 1878. Zetkin was committed to the cause of international socialism, but she also worked especially hard on the interests of women as a vital part of the socialist revolution. A fixture of ex-pat German socialism, when Zetkin returned to Germany after the ban on socialism was lifted, she became the editor of the SPDs women’s newspaper, Equality, which she guided for the next 25 years. As a leader of the socialist wing of the International Women’s Movement, Zetkin was hostile to the aristocratic sensibilities of bourgeois liberal feminism, but she was also opposed to her young friend Rosa Luxemburg’s opinion that the women’s question was entirely beside the main point of revolutionary class struggle. Zetkin believed women needed to address this struggle as women, but at the same time, she always fought alongside Luxemburg from the position of the revolutionary left in any larger controversy inside socialist circles about tactics, strategy, and ideology. Together, they would defiantly break with the SPD leadership in August 1914, and help found the antiwar and Pro revolution Spartacus Group.

The third person I need to introduce here is their friend and ally Karl Liebknecht. Liebknecht came from socialist royalty. He was the son of Wilheim Liebknecht, a veteran of 1848, lifelong friend of fellow London exile Karl Marx, member of the original Communist League, and founder of the Social Democratic Workers Party of Germany, and he helped lead the merger with the German workers party Association in 1875, forming the party that would officially rechristen itself as the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1890. That was the life Karl Liebknecht was born into an 1871. An active socialist lawyer, he was a leading voice against German militarism, writing polemics that eventually got him thrown in prison in 1907, where he was still sitting when the voters elected him to the Prussian parliament in 1908. Once out of prison, he was elected in the SPD’s great parliamentary victory of 1912, and so he was actually in the Reichstag when the decisive vote on war credits came up in August 1914. Under heavy pressure to tow the party line, Liebknecht chose to abstain, so as not to violate his anti-war principles, but also so that he didn’t upset the party leadership, which was now being led by the aforementioned Friedrich Ebert, who wanted a unanimous vote from the party to absolutely establish their patriotic loyalty.

Liebknecht did not live in this conflicted space for long, and he joined Luxemburg and Zetkin and other antiwar pro-revolution socialists to form the core of the Spartacus Group. In December 1914, a vote came up in the Reichstag to renew the war credits and this time Liebknecht defiantly voted no, making him the only delegate in the Reichstag to do so. This earned him the eternal enmity of Friedrich Ebert and the other leaders of the SPD, who subsequently conspired with the government in February 1915 to have Liebknecht drafted into the military despite parliamentary immunity from conscription. As further retribution, he was expelled from the SPD, the party that his own father had helped found a generation earlier.

Now, just to be clear, the group they founded wasn’t technically called the Spartacus Group until January 1916, but the organization and its ideals were consistent from the start: oppose capitalism, oppose imperialism, oppose the war, and support any other group in Europe who felt the same, which made them allies of Lenin’s little Bolshevik group. Their activities were straight up illegal during the war years, and most of them were tossed in prison at various points, especially in 1916, when Liebknecht was sentenced to a four year prison term, and Luxemburg and Zetkin were both placed in preventative detention, as much to prevent what they might do, as punish them for what they had done.

But just as they were going into prison, their ideals started to gain wider currency. A faction in the membership of the SPD who had held their noses and voted for war credits in 1914 were by now thoroughly disillusioned with the war after two years spent in a murderous quagmire. This group included major socialist luminaries like Karl Kautsky and Edward Bernstein. Forming irreconcilable differences with the leadership group headed by Ebert, who continued to support the war, members started quitting or getting expelled from the party. Shortly after the February Revolution hit Russia, these anti-war German socialists came together to form a new party, called the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was then known by its German acronym, the USPD. The Spartacus Group joined the USPD as its radical left-wing.

For the rest of 1917 and 1918, the USPD and the Spartacists supported strikes, protests, and military mutinies against the government and the war, which grew in size and scope as the war continued and de facto military dictatorship in Germany deepened. These were the strikes and mutinies that Lenin and his Bolsheviks were keeping such a close and hopeful eye on.

After Germany’s last ditch offensive in the spring of 1918 failed, and by the fall of 1918, the war was looking hopelessly lost, the political ties binding the German Empire started to strain and snap. And so what I want to do now is plot the course of the German Revolution of 1918. But with specific reference to the map that had been laid out by the Russians in 1917. Because the two events unfolded in remarkably similar ways, but there are enough critical distinctions between the two that they wind up in very different places. So, what I want to do here is keep an eye on the course of the Russian Revolution as we talk about the course of the German Revolution, and compare and contrast the two, to understand why one wound up as the Communist Soviet Union, while the other wound up as the parliamentary Weimar Republic.

So, to start this, in October 1918, we find Kaiser Wilhelm in the same kind of position his cousin Tsar Nicholas had been in in January 1917: presiding over an autocratic empire that was teetering on the brink of collapse, and being pressured to liberalize, democratize, and swap out the leadership as the only way to survive. In Wilhelm’s case, he was facing demands from the advancing allies, now especially the Americans, saying that democratization of the German political system was a precondition of peace negotiations. But the Kaiser was also taking the same kind of advice from the military high command, guys like General Ludendorff, who were eager to throw the messy and humiliating business of surrender over to a bunch of new civilian politicians in order to pin the blame for losing the war on them rather than the military. And this becomes the origin of the infamous stabbed in the back myth, that the military could have won the war had it not been for these dirty politicians.

On October 3rd, the Kaiser appointed the liberal Prince Maximilian of Baden to serve as the new chancellor of Germany, and oversee a transition to a constitutionally responsible government. Which, right away, we see a key difference between the German Revolution and the Russian Revolution. As Willie did in 1918 what Nikky had so stubbornly refused to do in 1917: inaugurate a new government holding parliamentary confidence.

Now, until the end of October, changes to the German political system will come in swift and confusing succession, but nothing yet was particularly revolutionary. That would all change thanks to the Supreme Naval Command. Still believing they could salvage Germans’ position with a final all-out assault on the Royal Navy in the English Channel, the admiral sent an order on October 24th, 1918, for all ships to prepare to sail into this final battle. But when they got this order, the crews instead mutinied. This naval mutiny is the trigger for the German Revolution. After several days of defiance, mutiny, and sabotage, sailors gathered at the naval base in Kiel, ostensibly to protest the rest of some of their comrades, but they were also now in cahoots with radical civilian leaders, and they gathered under banners that read peace and bread. These mutinous sailors were about to become ground zero for a true revolutionary moment. After armed clashes with troops loyal to the government left dead bodies on the ground, 40,000 rebellious sailors took over the Naval base and the adjacent town — and if we glance at our map of the Russian revolution, the Naval mutiny in Kiel is essentially the equivalent to the mutiny of the Petrograd Garrison in February 1917, which tipped a political crisis into a full blown political revolution.

Late in the evening on November the fourth, 1918 sailors and workers in Kiel established a soldiers and workers council, deliberately modeled on the soviets of the Russian Revolution, and then they sent delegations of sailors to other major cities to proselytize the revolution and encourage everybody to set up their own councils, which was just the German word for soviets. Within a matter of days, most of the large coastal cities were in the hands of these revolutionary groups, and then it spread to Hanover, Brunswick, Frankfurt, Munich. Things now moved very fast in a very revolutionary direction; workers and soldiers were setting up councils, and all of this is obviously akin to the spread of the soviets throughout Russia after the establishment of the first Petrograd Soviet at the end of February 1917.

In Berlin, the rapid spread of these councils/soviets was met by hostile alarm from Friedrich Ebert and the other senior leaders of the SPD who absolutely did not want a soviet style revolution in Germany. Ebert believed it was vital to prevent the kind of social revolution that had taken down Russia. He believed it was vital to ensure a smooth and peaceful transition to a new form of government, and that SPD itself would command enough electoral strength to enshrine socialist goals using the ballot box, not the barricade. Standing between the radical left and the oldest establishment, Ebert put himself forward as the one leader who could navigate Germany through this moment without disrupting any administrative functions, enacting mass land confiscation, or nationalizing industry. Socialist changes would come, but they would be carefully managed, and enacted after prolonged deliberation, not in one apocalyptic flash of social revolution.

So the key date of the German Revolution is November 9th, 1918. The Kaiser was now under enormous pressure to abdicate the throne, not just to satisfy the allies, but also his own people, who believed his departure was necessary to secure the aforementioned peace and bread. But Wilhelm was dragging his feet, so Prince Maximilian helped him out the door by simply announcing that the Kaiser and his eldest son had abdicated the throne, even though they really had not. Then, Maximillian resigned in handed his office to Friedrich Ebert, who thus became Minister President of Prussia and Chancellor of Germany. Now, Maximillian had no authority to do any of this; he just did it, and then it was done.

The streets of Berlin, meanwhile, were teaming with protestors and demonstrators and curious onlookers, and word reached the Reichstag building that Karl Liebknecht, who had just been released from prison, planned to seize the political initiative and proclaimed Germany a socialist republic from the seat of the Berlin city government. Catching wind of this, the deputy chairman of the SPD, a guy called Philip Scheidemann, spontaneously preempted the radicals. Over Ebert’s express objections, Scheidemann walked out onto the balcony of the Reichstag and announced to a gathered crowd that Germany was now a republic, long live the German Republic. So thanks to all of these events on November the ninth, Friedrich Ebert now presided over a self-created republican government, which makes November 9th, 1918, akin to March the second, 1917, the moment when leaders of the Russian Duma formed a provisional government amidst Tsar Nicholas’s own abdication. But there is a crucial difference between the two that becomes a very important: in the Russian case, the provisional government was all liberals, it was Kadets and Octobrists; whereas in Germany, they’re all socialists. It would be as if in Russia in February 1917, the Right SRs had formed the very first Russian provisional government [instead of] standing outside of it for so long. Oh, and I should also mention here that the liberal noble Prince Maximillian is basically playing the role the liberal noble Prince Lvov did in Russia, except Maximillian is just going to quit the scene instead of hanging around long enough to become frustrated and disillusioned with everyone and everything.

Trying to take back the political initiative, a group of about a hundred radical shop stewards then occupied the Reichstag building that night, and announced that every factory and military regiment within reach should send delegates the next day to the Circus Busch to elect a council of people’s deputies that would serve as the new government of republican Germany. Unable to stop the spread of this call, and recognizing that this meeting would be held whether he liked it or not. Ebert and the other SPD leaders leaned into this, and tried to get as many of their people as possible elected to the assembly. And so the next day, November 10th, an assembly of workers and soldiers indeed got together and elected a six man council of people’s deputies that was meant to serve as the new government for Germany. But by now the SPD and the USPD had come to an arrangement, and controlling a majority of the delegates at the assembly, they each got themselves three of the six seats on the Council of People’s Deputies, co-opting the intention of the radicals to form a more aggressively revolutionary body. These more radical elements then pulled a surprise move and called for the additional election of something they called the Executive Council of Workers and Soldiers Councils, which would oversee the Council of People’s Deputies, but the SPD and USPD leaders dominated this council too.

So when we map this over to Russia, this assembly on November the 10th, 1918 is clearly the equivalent to the formation of the Petrograd Soviet. And it was deliberately intended as such by the German radical left, who hoped to create a revolutionary body that could overawe Ebert’s government the way the Petrograd Soviet had dominated the Russian provisional government after February. But in the Russian case, the SRs and Mensheviks had won early control of the Petrograd Soviet, while it was liberal Kadets who were running the provisional government. Two different ideological parties, each in control of their own separate institution of government. But here in Germany in 1918, it’s just SPD guys everywhere you look. And so, while there is the faintest outline to the kind of dual power dynamic that defined Russian politics for the first few months after the Russian Revolution, and that certainly what the radical left is hoping happens, it’s just not going to develop the same way in Germany, after this was all settled to his satisfaction, if not exactly joy Ebert got on the horn to General Wilhelm Groener, who had taken over the critical job of quartermaster general of the German military. Ebert and Groener came to a very quick understanding with each other: Ebert promised to keep the autonomy of the military in place and not mess with the army hierarchy at all if Groener and the military brass supported Ebert in his coming fight to stop the radical left from trying to implement something like the Russian Soviets, which they both agreed would be a disaster.

Groener agreed, with far reaching consequences. Ebert now had the support of the military, and was not only temporarily safe from a right-wing military coup, but he could also count on armed soldiers to defend his nascent government if the radicals took up arms. And though it happens just a little bit out of order here, one does not have to squint very hard to see in this phone call between Ebert and Groener the communications between Kerensky and Kornilov in August 1917, which might have had the same effect in the Russian Revolution and forestalled the October Revolution had not Kerensky hung Kornilov out to dry.

Now the day after all this is the infamous 11th of November and the signing of the armistice that officially ended the war. And here more than anywhere we find the key difference between the Russian and German revolutions. The Russian Revolution took place while the war was still ongoing. The whole first wave of revolutionary leaders, whether they were Kadets or SRs or Mensheviks, in fact believed that one of the key objects of the revolution was to simply install better leaders who could win the war. This made the question of war or peace one of the key questions of 1917. And when Kerensky’s June Offensive collapsed in failure, the Bolsheviks were able to make major political gains thanks to their anti-war position. Ebert’s government does not have to worry about maintaining an unpopular war, because the war is over. They have lost. So it’s not the case that radicals can run around arguing that the war should be over because the war is already over.

The other big component here is that because the war was still ongoing in Russia in 1917, the Russian military had to be kept in the field, and units became radicalized and democratized, making them insubordinate and unreliable, and far from being a bulwark defending the government, they would be a major threat to the government. Here in Germany in 1918, there’s no need to keep the army intact. The revolution isn’t going to radicalize military units because the political revolution is coinciding with mass military demobilization. Imagine how the course of the revolution would have been altered had World War I abruptly ended in February 1917. Now it’s actually pretty easy to imagine, because that’s basically what happens in Germany in November 1918.

So then, on the day after that, November 12th, the council Of People’s Deputies published a program for a social democratic government. It ended press censorship, it promised universal suffrage for everyone over the age of 20, including women, it offered amnesty for all political prisoners, it created freedom of association and assembly in the press, and on top of all those liberal civil rights, they also enshrined an eight hour workday as a statutory requirement, and they expanded unemployment, social insurance, and worker compensation benefits. This was all very popular. It lifted the burden of autocratic tyranny, but also provided social guarantees for the working class. This announced program put Ebert’s government on pretty solid popular footing, but they were still afraid of all those councils sprouting up out there, that they might grow into rival centers of power. But this fear was mostly based in ignorance of what was happening at the grassroots level. To take one example, the famous sociologist Max Weber joined a worker’s council in Heidelberg, and happily discovered that most of his colleagues were moderate liberals, just ready to take over distribution of food and support the frontline soldiers returning home, so many of these German councils didn’t resemble bolshevised soviets so much as the old liberal zemstvos. But Ebert and his fellow leaders in the SPD were still in the grips of, uh, y’know, not unreasonable amount of paranoia, and they were especially afraid of an empire-wide convention of councils that was set to convene in Berlin in mid-December. General Groener dutifully sent several divisions of troops to Berlin, but when Ebert tried to use them to prevent the convention of councils from meeting, this group simply self-demobilized; they refused to do anything. The next batch sent in were then too clumsy in their movements, and fired on an unarmed group of demonstrators on December the 16th, which did not stop the convention from meeting, and only reflected poorly on Ebert and his government.

But Ebert had nothing to worry about here. It’s not like the delegates were radical Sparacists. Even Karl Liebknecht failed to win a seat. Everyone in the room was almost uniformly SPD, and on December the 19th, this council voted 344 to 98 against the creation of a Russian style soviet system as the basis of the new constitution. They instead supported the government call for elections for a national assembly, empowered to settle all republican constitutional questions. So, there’s really no dual power here. There’s never going to be a situation where the soviet over here and the provisional government over there are at loggerheads with each other, because everywhere you look, it’s just members of the SPD. They’re all pulling in the same direction.

And, speaking of this forthcoming national assembly to settle all constitutional questions, we saw how bad it was for the Russians to stall and stall on calling their national assembly. Now this stalling was partly due to just incompetence, but it was also because they wanted to wait until the war was over. And then, when the war just kept going, the constituent assembly was endlessly put off .Failing to deliver a democratic constitution in a timely manner meant that it was permanently preempted by the October Revolution.

And this year is another big consequence, I think, of the German revolution happening against the backdrop of peace rather than war. The Germans could move decisively to their constituent assembly without worrying about the effect it may or may not have on national defense. It’s also possible they were more competent.

But though the political tide was clearly running in his favor, Ebert then tried to make a move to further secure his government’s position that very nearly wrecked everything. Now back on November the 11th, a group of radicalized sailors formed what they called the People’s Navy Division. They installed themselves in Berlin to defend the revolution, and in its initial weeks was tolerated by the government, but now Ebert wanted them demobilized. As a first move, the sailors’ wages stopped being paid, and then they were deliberately ignored when they complained about it. Instead of taking this lying down however, on December the 23rd, about a thousand of these sailors marched into the Imperial Chancellery. They occupied the building, and they held the Council of People’s Deputies hostage. Ebert’s response to this was to get on a secret phone line to military headquarters and call for an attack by loyal troops.

So, on the morning of December the 24th, about 800 soldiers tried to take back control of the Chancellery. But here’s the thing: they failed. The sailors successfully repelled them, and the government troops were forced to pull out of the city center entirely. Had the sailors been more politically ambitious, things might have spun in a completely different direction right then and there. Ebert’s alliance with the military clearly hadn’t produced a decisive military force to defend his government, and for the moment, right here on Christmas Eve in 1918, armed radicals were the masters of the government and of the Berlin city center.

But the sailors were not more politically ambitious. All they did was negotiate for their wages to be paid in full, and for a promise not to be demobilized. And that was it. They went home.

But though this incident wasn’t itself a decisive historical moment, it triggered some profound ripples that produced a decisive historical moment. First, Ebert and Groener recognized that the regular army was maybe not as reliable as they had expected. So in response, they accelerated a program of raising what they called the Freikorps, officially sanctioned paramilitary units composed of volunteers from the demobilizing soldiers. In most cases, the officers and soldiers who would volunteer for such service had little to look forward to back in civilian life. They jumped at the chance to stay inside the structure of the military and be allowed to vent their aggressions, now exacerbated by the humiliation of defeat. The Freikorps volunteers also tended to be politically conservative and nationalistic, and they were more than happy to go beat the heads of dirty traitorous socialists in the service of, well, whoever gave them permission to go beat the heads of dirty traitorous socialists.

So the Freikorps don’t map one to one with the Russian Black Hundreds, but they are playing basically the same role. They were going to turn out to be the muscle of right-wing German politics. The Freikorps will, in time, be an early incubator of the kind of fascism that was taking root in post-war Europe. But for now, the military establishment that was in control of them was aligned with Ebert’s government against the radical left, so the Freikorps would find themselves bashing the heads of socialists on behalf of… other socialists. But that would not always be the case.

The other big result of the sailors storming the Chancellery over Christmas was that it fractured the very brief political alliance between the SPD and the USPD on the one hand, and also ended the longer alliance between the USPD and the Spartacists. In protest of Ebert’s actions taken over Christmas, the USPD resigned from the Council of People’s deputies, which left them free to chart a more oppositional course from the outside, but it of course also left the SPD without any internal opposition; they were free to do whatever they wanted without having to placate anyone.

Meanwhile, the Spartacus Group took this moment to break off and go their own way entirely. On December 31st, 1918, they formally refounded themselves as the Communist Party of Germany, and they were looking to be the party of true proletarian revolution. The original Spartacists were joined by other left-wing socialist groups and workers dissatisfied with the tepid course of the revolution thus far. Its leaders were of course the people I introduced at the beginning of the show: Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and Karl Liebknecht. In her initial declaration announcing the formation of the party, Luxemburg laid out what she thought was their program: that they must dedicate all their energy to raising a mass movement from the grassroots up, to build the councils into a network of majoritarian power that would then supplant Ebert’s government. She said, “Comrades, we have here an extensive field to till. We must build from below upward until the workers and soldiers’ councils gather so much strength that the overthrow of the Ebert or any other similar government will be merely the final act in the drama.”

she then said that the revolution would not be a matter of one dramatic blow, but the work of steady agitation and activism. “We have to work from beneath,” she said, “therein is displayed the mass character of our revolution, one which aims at transforming the whole structure of society. It is thus characteristic of the modern proletarian revolution that we must affect the conquest of political power, not from above, but from beneath.” Their ultimate objective would be to stop the compromises with capitalism pursued by moderate socialists in the SPD, and instead pursue real revolutionary change: land redistribution, nationalization of industry, and a dictatorship of the proletariat, which she took to mean just the majority of the people.

But here on New Year’s Eve 1918, Luxemburg did not expect or anticipate an armed uprising. She said that in the end, “strikes will become the central feature and the decisive factor of the revolution.”

But everything spun out of control within a couple of days. The chief of the Berlin police refused to take action against any of the sailors who had stormed the Chancellery, and he was fired. The USPD and the newly rechristened Communist Party then both called for protest demonstrations and set them for Sunday, January 5th. Those demonstrations turned out to be much bigger than anyone anticipated. Thousands of people poured into the streets, and many of them were armed. By that afternoon, train stations were being occupied as well as the offices of newspapers critical of the radical left. Leaders of the USPD and the Communists then hastily gathered at the Berlin police headquarters and formed a revolutionary committee, but they had difficulty agreeing on anything. They had no clear direction and didn’t quite know what they wanted to do. But eventually they settled on taking Luxemburg’s advice. They put out a call for a general strike to begin January 7th. This too turned out to be a big hit with the workers of Berlin, and 500,000 people surged through the streets of Berlin. But for Rosa Luxemburg, this show of mass support should have properly marked the beginning of a larger sustained revolutionary movement. Instead, some hotheads decided this was it, this is the moment, it’s the perfect time to overthrow Ebert’s government and launch a full-blown communist revolution like the Russians had done in October 1917.

Now Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and other communist leaders thought this would be catastrophic, and they spoke out against launching an insurrection, but it was soon out of their hands. Ignoring the leadership, armed insurgencies key buildings, and what we now call the Spartacus Uprising began, launched over the protests and most of the leaders of the Spartacus Group, who could only belatedly hope for the best.

That revolutionary committee meanwhile, that was supposed to be leading this thing couldn’t agree on what to do. When leaders of the USPD reached out to Ebert on January the eighth to negotiate a compromise, the Communist leaders stormed out. The next day, posters started going up around Berlin saying “the hour of reckoning is coming soon.” This is because Ebert had spent all his time rapidly recruiting and arming more Freikorps volunteers. When talks with the USPD broke down, Ebert ordered 3000 Freikorps to counter attack on January the ninth, heavily armed with all the guns and ammunition the army could provide, and it did not take them long to reconquer the barricaded streets and buildings that have been taken by the insurgents, who remained an isolated few, as they had not managed to trigger any kind of mass armed uprising. Somewhere between 150 and 200 people were killed in the fighting, and the rest surrendered. The Spartacus Uprising was over almost as quickly as it had begun. They were going for the October Revolution, but clearly this is far more like the July Days of 1917, when Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership had tried to prevent their followers from staging an armed uprising which they correctly determined was premature and doomed to failure.

The Spartacus Uprising is as far as the radical left is going to get in the German Revolution. There would be no advance from the failure of the July Days to the triumph of the October Revolution. And that’s partly because of what happened a week later: on January 15th, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were discovered hiding out in an apartment building, and they were delivered to the Eden Hotel. Headquarters of the largest. Freikorps unit in the city. Holding the two Communist leaders outside the chain of regular law and order, the Freikorps soldier spent several hours beating and interrogating them. The officer in charge then formally ordered Karl Liebknecht to be transferred to a prison, but along the way, the car stopped, and Liebknecht was ordered to get out. When he did, he was immediately shot in the back, using the tried and true cover story that he had tried to escape.

Rosa Luxemburg’s meanwhile, brought through the lobby of the hotel and severely beaten there by some assembled soldiers before her unconscious body was thrown into a truck. She was unceremoniously shot in the back of the head, and her body was dumped in a canal.

The murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg pretty much marked the end of the line for the radical left wing and the German Revolution. Deprived of their most capable leaders, there would be no equivalent advance from the July Days to the October Revolution. And we also see here, the probable outcome for the Bolsheviks had some Black Hundreds gotten ahold of Lenin and murdered him in July 1917: they would have gotten nowhere; certainly not to the October Revolution.

But even if Luxemburg and Liebknecht had lived, it might not have mattered. Elections to the German National Assembly came off without a hitch on the basis of universal suffrage. Moderate delegates then convened away from the dangerous streets of Berlin in the city of Weimar to craft a republic rooted in parliamentary democracy that refused to follow the more radical Communist example. And thus was born the Weimar Republic.

And not for nothing, but had circumstances been different in Russia in 1917, had the leaders done one or two things differently, had they not been forced to deal with an ongoing war, had Lenin gotten a bullet put into his brain, a parliamentary democracy run by Kadets and Right SRs might very well have been the result of the Russian Revolution too.

Or a right-wing military dictatorship. You know, whichever.

So bringing this all back around so that we can pick things back up in Russia in 1919, the failure of the Spartacus Uprising in Germany was a bitter pill to swallow, especially because no further proletarian revolution appeared imminent in France or Britain or the United States. Everywhere they looked the capitalist and the imperialists remained in power, and in places like Germany were socialists were getting an upper hand, they were fully ready to compromise with the capitalists and the imperialists.

The Russian Communists are now going to have to figure out how they are going to survive while permanently surrounded on all sides by enemies of their revolution.