mass terror and to abolish the death penalty. Lenin justified this important political move of the Soviet state in the following manner in his report at the session of the All-Union Central Executive Committee on February 2, 1920:
"We were forced to use terror because of the terror practiced by the Entente, when strong world powers threw their hordes against us, not avoiding any type of conduct. We would not have lasted two days had we not answered these attempts of officers and White Guardists in a merciless fashion; this meant the use of terror, but this was forced upon us by the terrorist methods of the Entente.
"But as soon as we attained a decisive victory, even before the end of the war, immediately after taking Rostov, we "gave up the use of the death penalty and thus proved that we intend to execute our own program in the manner that we promised. We say that the application of violence flows out of the decision to smother the exploiters, the big landowners and the capitalists; as soon as this was accomplished we gave up the use of all extraordinary methods. We have proved this in practice.[1]"
Stalin deviated from these clear and plain precepts of Lenin. Stalin put the party and the NKVD up to the use of mass terror when the exploiting classes had been liquidated in our country and when there were no serious reasons for the use of extraordinary mass terror.
This terror was actually directed not at the remnants of the defeated exploiting classes but against the honest workers of the party and of the Soviet state; against them were made lying, slanderous and absurd accusations concerning "two-facedness," "espionage," "sabotage," preparation of fictitious "plots," etc.
At the February-March Central Committee plenum in 1937 many mem-
- ↑ Khrushchev's account of the Bolsheviks' abolition of the death penalty in January 1920 is altogether incorrect. The action stemmed from Lenin's desire to ease negotiations with the Western democracies. (These negotiations had been opened by a Russian cooperative delegation headed by the well-known cooperative leader Berkenheim.) In reality, the death penalty was not abolished at all. It was fully maintained in the many areas situated near the Civil War fronts. Moreover, several days before publication of his order to halt executions, Dzerzhinsky issued a secret order to speed up the liquidation of those whom the Soviet punitive organs deemed it desirable to execute. As a result, there were mass executions in all the jails in the last days before the "abolition of the death penalty." In Moscow's Butyrka prison, the condemned men learned that the death penalty was to be abolished the following day, and there were frightful scenes when the executioners came for them. Some of them broke away and hid in the prison yard in hope of surviving until morning, hut they were caught and shot. In the general frenzy, a number of persons were shot whose death sentences had already been commuted to prison terms. Finally, in May 1920, with the outbreak of the Russian-Polisli war, the death penalty was officially restored. Both Dzerzhinsky's order and Lenin's speech were rank hypocrisy.
