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Special pages :
Letter to Karl Radek, October 20, 1928
| Author(s) | Leon Trotsky |
|---|---|
| Written | 20 October 1928 |
Analogies with Thermidor
Dear K.B:
I received your essay on the "democratic revolution" from Moscow, in the same way that in general, since the very beginning of this exile, I have been one of the last to learn of your views, and have learned of them almost exclusively second-hand. Please don't take this to imply that I have any claims against you. For my part I will continue as I have thus far to include you among the first to receive everything I write.
On the present occasion I am sending you a copy of some writings of your own, which I accidentally came across among my papers. Despite the fact that one of these works is fourteen months old and the other nearly two years old, their timeliness is beyond question. The first work is the counterdraft you wrote of theses on the August [1927] plenum, in opposition to Zinoviev, who was guilty [in his theses] of idealizing the party apparatus and attempting to drag "anti-Trotskyism" in as ideological preparation for his [later] renegacy. Our group [i.e., the 1923 Oppositionists] was in agreement with your theses, which I personally considered superb (for that particular moment). We agreed, however, to sign Zinoviev's theses (with amendments), in order to put Zinoviev in the position of having to break over programmatic and tactical questions, that is, in the writing of the Platform, and not over the two hobby horses he was raising artificially â "two parties" and "Trotskyism."
Besides that, I am sending you as an appendix an excerpt from another work of yours, "The Thermidorian Danger and the Opposition." In view of the fact that you recently dredged up the question of the admissibility of analogies with Thermidor [in theses to the Sixth Congress], it is not unbeneficial to remind you of how you yourself replied to such doubts a year and a half or two years ago.