Rosa Luxemburg Thinks Lenin and Trotsky Will Humiliate the First Workers' State

In the same criticism of the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg issued a strong warning concerning the methods of preserving power adopted by Lenin and his party. She cautioned that the elimination of democracy, with its institutions that though cumbersome did prevent abuses of power, would lead to the mortification of the first workers’ state: “To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.”

--Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 99.