SPARTACANS, or SPARTACIDES, is the name acquired soon after the going into effect of the armistice accorded Germany in Nov. 1918, by the special followers of Karl Liebknecht (q.v.), leader of the extreme left wing of the German Socialist party, or Inde pendents, notably during the several risings of the latter against the moderate, or majority, Socialists under the leadership of Ebert and Scheidemann, who had formed a composite government from which the Spartacans had withdrawn as not realizing their political and economic ideals. There were several of these organized, or centralized, risings, the more con siderable occurring in January 1919, when in Berlin alone the deaths in the fighting on both sides were computed at sundry thousands, and quite a number of local and insufficiently or ganized ones in various parts of Germany, such as Halle, Brunswick, Leipzig, Dresden, Ham burg, Bremen, Duisburg and other places. The communistic uprising in Munich, on the other hand, which occurred during March and April 1919, does not properly figure under the head of Spartacan undertakings. The name of "Spartacan" originated from the pen name of Karl Liebknecht, aSpartacus; which he had adopted while being held prisoner by the former German imperial government during the last two years of the Great War, 1916-18, for his clandestine articles appearing in the press of the left wing of the Socialist party, notably Die Freiheit. The genesis of the Spartacans, however, ought to be traced to the very begin nings of the Great War, to August 1914, when the extreme wing of the great Socialist party in Germany first showed signs of a desire to secede from the party as a whole, as being unalterably opposed to the whole war which they deemed as being engineered by capitalis tic and militaristic influences and, therefore, to be condemned in Coto. This desire not long
after they carried out openly, constituting them selves as a new party in the Reichstag, in oppo sition to all others, and refusing throughout the remainder of the war to vote for supplies and funds to sustain it. When the split took place, out of a total of 108 party members in the Reichstag, 19, subsequently increased to 23, left the Socialist party and called itself the Independent. After the rather tame revolution that ousted the kaiser in the beginning of No vember, 1918, and 'led to the overturn of the whole imperial regime and the armistice itself, this Independent, or as later denominated, Spartacan, party veered further to radical tenets, becoming, in fact, communistic, even occasionally anarchistic, in its aims and prac tices, and not only leaning to, but affiliating with, the Bolshevist party of Russia. Karl Liebknecht himself aided in this molting proc ess, but was murdered in the streets of Berlin, together with his ablest lieutenant, Rosa Lux emburg (q.v.), before the tull development of that party movement. The adoption of the title of Spartacans has been considered by many a rather curious thing, since the rising of the Roman slaves under Spartacus came to a speedy evil end and left no trace behind it.