and by the early 1920s the revolutionary tide was ebbing. There are many reasons for the failure of the postwar revolutionary movement, but one not lost on contemporaries was the general predominance of the reformist wing of the socialist movement. This was clearest when, in Germany, Friedrich Ebert, the socialist leader of the new Weimar Republic, sent paramilitary Freikorps to put down the communist Spartacist uprising of January 1919. In the process, the Freikorps, composed primarily of battle-hardened World War I veterans, murdered communist luminaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Need to read more about Rosa Luxemburg.
