  This belief in the power of the oppressed masses, and the role of spontaneous action in developing revolutionary organisation informed Luxemburg’s response to her colleagues in the German social democratic party and her call to combine parliamentary initiatives with the defence of the mass strike as the focal point of revolutionary organisation. The extent to which these views were reflected in her attitude to the Polish workers movement, with regard to which Luxemburg is sometimes criticised for her rigidity and sectarian stance, is a contested question (Blanc 2017). However, there is no doubt that her political experience with both Polish and German organisations, played an important role in the analysis of the political developments in Russia, from the revolution of 1905 to the Bolshevik conquest of power after October 1917. Initially sceptical of the possibility that a workers’ government in Russia could last for a long time, Luxemburg nevertheless praised the Bolsheviks for the symbolic importance of showing to the world that a revolutionary programme led by the proletariat was worth fighting for despite the constraints imposed by circumstances. She also urged her colleagues in the SPD to abandon their caution and support the Bolsheviks with greater conviction that the oppressed people of Russia would eventually be able to find their orientation despite what many considered to be “unripe circumstances”. As she put it in her essay on the Russian revolution, writen while in prison during World War I but published after her death in 1922, “when the proletariat seizes power, it can never again follow Kautsky’s good advice to dispense with a socialist transformation of a country on the grounds that‘the country is unripe’”. What it needs, she argues, is to “immediately embark on socialist measures in the most energetic, the most unyielding and the most ruthless way; in other words, it must exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique – and dictatorship of the class means: in full view of the broadest public, with the most active, uninhibited participation of the popular masses in an unlimited democracy” (Luxemburg 1922 [RLR: 25, see also 307–308]).