In this final chapter Luxemburg returns to the anti-democratic nature of the Bolsheviks touched on in Chapter 4. While she recognizes the deficiencies of democracy in the Russian revolutionary government, she forgives the Bolshevik leaders because of the overwhelming obstacles that confronted them. In addition to the epidemics, war, lack of food, counter-revolutionary armies, invasions by capitalist nations, she refers also to the lack of international support for the Russian revolution by socialist organizations in the more advanced capitalist countries. I remember reading somewhere that this concern was also shared by Lenin and Trotsky who saw the need for revolutions in other capitalist countries in order for the Russian revolution to be successful.
Let the German Government Socialists cry that the rule of the Bolsheviks in Russia is a distorted expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat. If it was or is such, that is only because it is a product of the behavior of the German proletariat, in itself a distorted expression of the socialist class struggle. All of us are subject to the laws of history, and it is only internationally that the socialist order of society can be realized. The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of historical possibilities. They are not supposed to perform miracles. For a model and faultless proletarian revolution in an isolated land, exhausted by world war, strangled by imperialism, betrayed by the international proletariat, would be a miracle.