[The following is in regards to the actions of the new Bolshevik regime during the Russian Revolution.]
This convoluted language meant that Revolutionary Tribunals were free to sentence offenders to death as they saw fit, but were required to do so when the government mandated such punishment. The first victim of this new ruling was the Soviet commander of the Baltic Fleet, Admiral A. M. Shchastnyi, whom Trotsky accused of plotting to surrender his ships to the Germans: his example was to serve as a lesson to the other officers. Shchastnyi was tried and sentenced on June 21 by a Special Revolutionary Tribunal of the Central Executive Committee, set up on Lenin’s orders to try cases of high treason.
When the Left SRs objected to this revival of the odious practice of the death penalty, Krylenko replied that the admiral “had been condemned not ‘to death’ but ‘to be shot.’ “
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Red Terror." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 798-99. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Izvestiia, No. 128/392 (June 23, 1918), 3.
Further Reading:
Lev Davidovich Bronstein / Лев Дави́дович Тро́цкий (Leon Trotsky)
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov / Lenin
Left Socialist Revolutionaries / Left SRs
Никола́й Васи́льевич Крыле́нко (Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko)
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