Page:Rosa Luxemburg - The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The "Junius" Pamplhet) - 1918.pdf/75

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THE CRISIS
73

the Russian uprising in 1905–1906 was unsuccessful inspite of its unequalled expenditure of revolutionary force, its clearness of purpose and tenacity, can be ascribed to two distinct causes. The one lies in the inner character of the Revolution itself, in its enormous historical program, in the mass of economic and political problems that it was forced to face. Some of them, for instance, the agrarian problem, cannot possibly be solved with capitalist society. There was the difficulty, furthermore, of creating a class-state for the supremacy of the modern bourgeoisie against the counter-revolutionary opposition of the bourgeoisie as a whole. To the onlooker it would seem that the Russian Revolution was doomed to failure because it was a proletarian revolution with bourgeois duties and problems, or if you wish, a bourgeois revolution waged by socialist proletarian methods, a crash of two generations amid lightning and thunder, the fruit of the delayed industrial development of class conditions in Russia and their overripeness in western Europe. From this point of view its downfall in 1906 signifies not its bankruptcy, but the natural closing of the first chapter, upon which the second must follow with the inevitability of a natural law. The second cause was of external nature: it lay in western Europe: European reaction once more hastened to help its endangered protégé. Not with lead and bullets, although "German guns" were in German fists even in 1905 and only waited for a signal from Petersburg to attack the neighboring Poles. Europe rendered an assistance that was equally valuable: financial subsidy and political alliances were arranged to help Czarism in Russia. French money paid for the armed forces that broke down the Russian Revolution; from Germany came moral and political support that helped the Russian government to clamber out from the depths of shame into which Japanese torpedoes and Russian proletarian fists had thrust it. In 1910, in Potsdam, official Germany received Russian Czarism with open arms. The reception of the bloodstained monarch at