9. Epilogue¶
Core Argument¶
This epilogue, written in the immediate aftermath of Radek’s public capitulation to Stalin, serves as a post-mortem on the political trajectory of a key Opposition figure and a broader indictment of centrist degeneration within the Comintern. The core argument is that apostasy has gradations, and Radek’s repentance—particularly his complete rehabilitation of Stalin’s policy in China—represents the lowest depth of betrayal, marking him and his co-signatories Preobrazhensky and Smilga as political cynics. Trotsky’s narrative thrust is to demonstrate that Radek’s path was not unforeseen but followed a consistent logic of theoretical error and political cowardice.
The chapter draws heavily on the experience of the Chinese Revolution as the decisive test. Trotsky’s key claim is that every Oppositionist who defended the subordination of the Chinese Communist Party to the bourgeois Kuomintang—as Radek and Smilga did, both before and after Chiang Kai-shek’s coup—inevitably became a capitulator. No Oppositionist who remained true to the banner bears this mark of shame. The evidence is drawn from Radek’s own shifting positions: he first called the Canton government a workers’ and peasants’ government, helping Stalin disguise proletarian subordination; then, in February 1928, he adhered to the Comintern Plenum resolution that branded Trotskyists as liquidators while proclaiming a course toward armed uprising and Soviets—a course Trotsky denounces as the most revolting adventurism. Preobrazhensky approached from the opposite end, declaring the Chinese Revolution defeated for a long time and questioning the point of squabbling, yet both reached the same conclusion: a desire for reconciliation with the Stalinist apparatus.
The polemic is sharp and personal. Trotsky counterposes to the adventurist February resolution his own programme of democratic slogans for China—constituent assembly, eight-hour day, land confiscation, national independence—arguing that without this democratic programme the Communist Party is bound hand and foot. He accuses Radek of skipping over the period of counter-revolution and the struggle for democracy, waving aside transitional tasks in favour of an abstract slogan of Soviets outside time and space. The theoretical context is the Marxist understanding of the democratic stage: Lenin’s teaching that democratic slogans are not withdrawn until real Soviets have conquered power and clashed with real democratic institutions. Against this, Trotsky positions the Stalin-Radek theory as an altered but not improved repetition of the Kuomintang experiment.
The epilogue concludes with the Opposition’s affirmation that no intermediate revolutionary regime exists between Kerenskyism or Kuomintangism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The workers of the East are warned to distrust, despise, and drive out those who preach such saving non-proletarian dictatorships.