Page:William Z. Foster - The Revolutionary Crisis of 1918-1921 (1921).djvu/10

 gated the military control to Noske, a Majority Socialist, who quickly adopted drastic measures to quell the dangerous uprising. Noske smashed the Soldiers' Soviets and placed old Imperialist officers at the head of the troops; he also demobilized the revolutionary military units and replaced them by volunteer organizations recruited from among reactionary elements of all sorts. Then, refusing all overtures for arbitration, he proceeded to drown the rebellion in blood.

The ensuing street fighting in Berlin was marked with extreme bitterness and intensity. It lasted just a week, and many hundreds lost their lives. On the rebels' side the burden of the struggle fell upon the Communists, as many of the Independents' leaders found that they had much more important business elsewhere. Little by little the Government, backed by the united capitalist class and also by a large share of the workers, got the upper hand. Its troops recaptured the unoccupied newspaper offices and other buildings, one after the other. The Government military officers, mostly Imperialists called back into the service by Noske, treated the worker prisoners with ferocity. They executed large numbers where captured. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg managed to escape, but were arrested soon afterward and brutally assassinated by their captors. Thus was the revolutionary left wing of the Socialist movement crushed only a week before the election to the Constituent Assembly took place.

The coming together of the Constituent Assembly was a great disillusionment to the workers, for they found themselves a minority therein, even as the revolutionaries had foretold. Their two parties mustered only 185 representatives (of which the Majority Socialists had 163 and the Independents 22), whereas the combined opposition parties had 236. Thus political power passed out of the