Postscript¶
Core Argument¶
This postscript, drawn from Leopold Trepper’s autobiography The Great Game, delivers a searing, personal epitaph for a generation of revolutionaries betrayed by the very movement they served. Its core narrative thrust is the degeneration of the Bolshevik ideal into Stalinist tyranny, framed as a historical catastrophe that consumed both the revolution and its most devoted adherents. Trepper, a former Stalinist who organised the Soviet spy network in Nazi Germany, speaks from the wreckage of that commitment.
The chapter’s key claim is that the October Revolution’s promise was extinguished not by external enemies but by internal decay. Trepper asserts that his generation, swept up in the “glow” of 1917, could not foresee that within fifty years Lenin would survive only as a corpse in Red Square. He draws a direct parallel between the two great monstrosities of the twentieth century—fascism and Stalinism—arguing that the revolutionary ideal was “engulfed” in this apocalypse. The absolute idea that gave meaning to his life, he writes, “has acquired a face whose features we no longer recognise.” This is not a critique from the outside but a confession from within the tradition.
The historical context is the long arc from revolutionary hope to bureaucratic counter-revolution, culminating in the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Trepper’s reference to “Russian tanks that crushed Prague” anchors his polemic in a concrete, contemporary betrayal. His argument is directed squarely against the deified party—the Stalinist apparatus that substituted itself for the working class and the revolutionary project. The lesson he draws is negative but not nihilistic: his generation’s failure forbids giving advice, but “history has too much imagination to repeat itself,” leaving room for hope.
The polemic is sharpest in Trepper’s reply to a young questioner in Denmark in 1973 who asked if he had sacrificed his life for nothing. Trepper’s “No” is conditional: his life has meaning only if people understand that they must not surrender themselves to a deified party. He insists that youth will succeed where his generation failed, and that socialism will triumph—but it “will not have the colour of the Russian tanks that crushed Prague.” The postscript thus functions as both a warning and a testament, rejecting Stalinism without abandoning the revolutionary horizon.