Czerwony Sztandar. (7 octavo issues 1904-06, 4 folio issues 1910-1913.)
ELEVEN ISSUES OF THE RED BANNER
[Luxemburg, Rosa, editor and contributor]. Czerwony Sztandar. Organ Socjaldemokracji Królestwa Polskiego I Litwy. [Warsaw?], January, 1904-March, 1905.
7 issues, 4to, each with 8 to 12 pages, all, except one issue (see below), with historiated headpieces printed in red and black; evenly a little browned; partly unopened; one issue from the archive of the Polish Social Democratic Party (SDKPiL) with their oval stamp in upper margin of page one.
4 issues, folio, 1910-1913.
A collection of eleven issues of the SDKPiL’s propaganda paper the Red Banner, which was founded by Rosa Luxemburg and her partner Leo Jogiches in 1902, illustrated with the famous headpiece designed by an unknown artist, including two issues published during the height of the 1905 Revolution in Russia and Poland. Already by December 1904 there had been demonstrations in all major cities of Russia and Russian Poland on an almost daily basis. January 1905 saw workers and pupils on strike in the Polish industrial centres. In February the rural workers began to strike. During 1905, in the Warsaw region alone, the tsarist army employed infantry 2797 times, the cavalry 804 times, and the artillery 56 times to crush the revolution. ‘That year, when it seemed that the people’s wrath would topple the tsardom, was for Luxemburg a time of intense work and extreme tension. Close to ninety articles of hers were published in the Polish and German press’ (Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 123).
The unsigned articles report on arrests, strikes, and the tactics of the reaction. It can be assumed, that the longer articles on political strategies and theory are most likely by Rosa Luxemburg or based on her writings. During 1905 most printers and publishers of left-wing material moved to Warsaw, to be closer to the events, so did Rosa Luxemburg.
Present are the following issues: Numbers 13, January 1904; 17, May 1904; 18, July 1904; 21, Pazdziernik 1904; 22, December 1904; 23, January 1905; and 24 March 1905 (apparently there was no monthly issue in February, as during the height of the revolution the paper appeared on a daily basis and in different formats). – The December, 1904, issue with stamp of the archive of the SDKPiL, is without red printing of the headpiece (an issue avant la couleur so-to-speak).
BUCOP I, p. 691 lists issues of 1911 and 1912 in the British Library only; not in OCLC; RLIN locates an incomplete run of issues from 1906 to 1913 in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, an apparently uninterrupted run from 1903 to 1905 in the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, founded in Vilnius, now in New York City. – See Józef Kozlowski, Proletariacka Mloda Polska, colour-plate 17 for an illustration of the first issue of 1902.
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