1905 Revolution

Afanasy Nikolaevich Matiushenko
Also spelled Afanasiy Matyushenko, born 1879 - Kharkov, Russia, died 20 October 1907 - Sevastopol, Russia

The Potemkin mutineer
Afanasy Matiushenko was the son of peasants from Kharkov province in the Ukraine. He was born in 1879, in the village of Dergachi. His father had to give up the unrewarding work of farming to become a shoemaker.

The revolt started on January 22 when a peaceful, mildly reformist, protest march in St. Petersburg was shoot at by troops with more than 1,000 killed or injured. This day became known as "Bloody Sunday." Rather than squelch the protests, the repression fanned the flames of rebellion.

The 70th anniversary of the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, giving us two convenient excuses to reexamine the Russian revolution. This brief history of the naval fortress-town in the Gulf of Finland gives us a particular viewpoint on the revolution itself: the viewpoint of some of its most combative participants.

I was born February 17th, 1889, in the city of Yekotirenodar (the gift of Catherine the Great), now known as Krasnodar, located in the province of Kuban, in the northern part of southern Russia. I was the fourth child of a middle-class family. My father had a shop that manufactured fur hats for the Cossacks.

The translation was made by the United Workers' Party in America and first published in Britain in Pamphlet form in 1935 by the Anti- Parliamentary Communist Federation.

It was later republished by the Independent Labour Party in the 1960s and went under the title of "Leninism or Marxism?"

Rosa Luxemburg's critique of Lenin's concept of revolutionary organisation, show the disagreements within the Marxist movements in Europe in the years preceding 1917; her comparisons with Blanquism and chillingly accurate predictions of the consequences of such organisation in a successful revolution are incredibly important to an understanding of the differing interpretations of Marx at that tim

Publisher: Marxist Educational Society of Detroit, 1925
Translated: Patrick Lavin
Online Version: Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1999
Transcription/Markup: AL