Volume 34, Number 5 · March 26, 1987
Red Rosa
By James Joll
Rosa Luxemburg: A Life
by Elzbieta Ettinger
Beacon Press, 286 pp., $24.95
It is easier to sympathize with unsuccessful revolutionaries than with successful ones. For all the admiration which, for example. Lenin's intelligence, ruthless determination, and revolutionary charisma may inspire, he is ultimately judged by the kind of society to which his revolution gave rise and which led to Stalin's arbitrary tyranny and the heartless bureaucratic oppression of Stalin's successors. But the case of the failed revolutionaries of the early twentieth century—Antonio Gramsci, say, or Rosa Luxemburg, or even Trotsky—is very different. They not only appear as martyrs to the revolutionary cause but also as symbols of a revolution that might have turned out differently.
Review, 4201 words
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