Letters from prison

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Introduction

The first three letters were first presented by Feliks Tych in the Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 27. Jahrgang, September 1996, No.3. The fourth and fifth letters were published in the 6th volume of Rosa Luxemburg’s Letters in German, i.e. Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Briefe, Vol.6, Dietz Verlag 1993. Detailed source information follows each letter.

The first three letters were written at the same time as her article, The Russian Revolution, and can be understood as an extension of and commentary on it. The letters were written while Rosa Luxemburg was in prison in Breslau. The prison regime was such that she was able to her correspondence and articles smuggled out. Nevertheless, it is apparent from their style, i.e. conspirative nature, that she reckoned with them being intercepted or being read by the Soviet legation, who forwarded her letters to their recipients. In fact, Rosa Luxemburg asks directly in one of her letters whether she could write openly express her opinion on what was going on in Russia. Tych comments in his introduction to the letters that this was a dramatic example of how early on revolutionaries began to censure themselves, and that on the basis of a political “control” of their own comrades.

One of the main aspects of the first three letters was her critical attitude to the politics of the Bolsheviks, to the Brest Litovsk Peace treaty and to “revolutionary terror”, i.e. to everything that contradicted the democratic concept of the revolution and Rosa Luxemburg’s own expectations of it. The most important historical point of these letters, however, is that it destroys the legend first put out by Clara Zetkin, most probably in good faith, that Rosa Luxemburg had not planned to publish her article, The Russian Revolution.

Another interesting aspect of these letters is Rosa Luxemburg’s rather deferential attitude to her comrades in the Spartacus group. Interesting information on the group and on Rosa Luxemburg by Mathilde Jacob, Rosa Luxemburg’s secretary and assistant to the Spatacus leadership and later to the KPD centre, was published in December 1988 Issue of the IWK in 1988. A further report based on material made available after 1989 from the central party archive of the SED, published in the IWK December 1993, also makes an excellent read.

For the sake of historical completeness, the remaining two letters provide an interesting background to the activities or Rosa Luxemburg and show how difficult it sometimes is to provide an accurate picture of someone’s views. The fourth letter to Adolf Warski, was first published by Warski in Hamburg in 1922 in a book entitled Rosa Luxemburg’s Position on the Tactical Problems of the Revolution. The content is somewhat problematic because the letter was only related by Warski and not directly translated from the original, and therefore it is not verifiable. The fifth letter expresses Rosa Luxemburg’s greetings to Lenin and expresses her wish that all their wishes for the coming year be fulfilled.

A few words to the translations. The first three letters and the fifth were translated by Dave Hollis, the fourth by Mike Jones. The translations of the first three and the fifth letter were not easy because they all had been translated once already, i.e. from Polish or Russian. I therefore erred on the side of caution and tried to keep as far as people to the original German translation, even if that meant being at the cost of readability. In two cases I saw myself forced to explain why I had translated the way I had. In comparison to the original publication in English I have made a few minor changes to correct mistakes or explain certain aspects more fully.

Dave Hollis

Contents :

• To Julian Marchlewski (July–August)
• To Stefan Bratman-Brodowski (September)
• To Julian Marchlewski (September)
• To Adolf Warski (November–December)
• To Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (December)