"The History of Possibility"

"Ever since the 1905 upheaval in Russia, Luxemburg had suspected Lenin’s faction of what she scornfully termed a 'barracks' mentality. A short while after the 1917 revolution, we find her writing a succession of letters, describing the situation in Russia as 'abysmal' and the Bolsheviks as deserving of 'a terrible tongue-lashing' for their repression of rival parties such as the Social Revolutionaries, and their unilateral decision to abolish the Constituent Assembly. She extends this condemnation to include the police mentality (concerning incessant foreign 'conspiracies') that underlay Soviet foreign policy. She singles out a certain 'Józef' as a particular exemplar of this attitude, and with yet another shock of premonition, one discovers that this was the 'party name' of her fellow Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka and later considered the father of the KGB. It was during this time that Luxemburg made her imperishable defense of free speech, boldly stating that the concept was meaningless unless it meant the freedom of 'the one who thinks differently.'"

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic reviews The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg.