On February 21, 1918, Lenin submitted to the cabinet the draft of a decree called “The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!” The inspiration was the German advance into Russia following the Bolshevik failure to sign the Brest Treaty. The document appealed to the people to rise in defense of the country and the Revolution. In it, Lenin inserted a clause that provided for the execution “on the spot” – that is, without trial – of a broad and undefined category of villains labeled “enemy agents, speculators, burglars, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, [and] German spies.” Lenin included summary justice for ordinary criminals (“speculators, burglars, hooligans”) in order to gain support fort the decree from the population, which was sick of crime, but his true target was his political opponents, called “counterrevolutionary agitators.”
The Left SRs criticized this measure, being opposed in principle to the death penalty for political opponents. “I objected,” Steinberg writes:
that this cruel threat killed the whole pathos of the manifesto. Lenin replied with derision, “On the contrary, herein lies the true revolutionary pathos. Do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very cruelest revolutionary terror?”
It was difficult to argue with Lenin on this score, and we son reached an impasse. We were discussing a harsh police measure with far-reaching terroristic potentialities. Lenin resented my opposition to it in the name of revolutionary justice. So I called out in exasperation, “Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice? Let’s call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination and be done with it!”
Lenin’s face suddenly brightened and he replied, “Well put… that’s exactly what it should be…. But we can’t say that.”
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Red Terror." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 794-95. Print.
Original Sources Listed:
Dekrety, I, 490-91.
Steinberg, In the Workshop, 145.
Further Reading:
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov / Lenin
Left Socialist Revolutionaries / Left SRs
Исаак Нахман Штейнберг (Isaac Nachman Steinberg)
[Народный комиссариат юстиции (People's Commissariat for Justice) / Министерство юстиции СССР (Ministry of Justice of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Justice_(Soviet_Union)
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