Postscript¶
Core Argument¶
The postscript, dated September 1936, situates the book’s analysis in direct relation to the first of the Moscow show trials, which had been announced after the manuscript was already with the publishers. The author argues that the trial’s proceedings, though not evaluated in the body of the text, are in fact anticipated and exposed by the book’s own theoretical and historical logic. The core claim is that the trial is not a genuine judicial process but a deliberate mystification—a piece of political theatre whose “mystery” is manufactured to conceal its true function. The postscript insists that the book’s earlier demonstration of the historic logic governing Stalinist repression serves as an advance exposure of the trial’s fraudulent character. The polemical target is implicit but unmistakable: the official narrative of the Soviet prosecution, which presented the defendants as a unified terrorist conspiracy linked to Trotsky and foreign intelligence services. By framing the trial as mystification, the postscript aligns with the Trotskyist defence that the confessions were coerced and the charges fabricated. The historical context is the opening phase of the Great Terror, in which the Stalinist leadership used show trials to liquidate the Old Bolshevik opposition and consolidate absolute control. The postscript’s brevity and timing underscore its function as a political intervention, not a scholarly afterword: it asserts that the book’s argument is vindicated by events that postdate its completion, and it calls on the reader to recognise the trial as a logical extension of the bureaucratic degeneration the book anatomises. The tone is confident, even defiant, claiming predictive power for the analysis while refusing to engage with the trial’s specific evidence or testimony. The postscript thus serves as a seal on the book’s central thesis: that the Stalinist regime’s turn against its own revolutionary past is not an aberration but the necessary outcome of the political and social dynamics it has described.