16.02.1995

Russia abolishes death penalty

From The Call, paper of the British Socialist Party, February 19 1920

[Quoting Lenin’s speech to the central executive committee of the All-Russian Soviet Congress]

“In this way we have definitely overthrown the bourgeois calumny that the Soviet government is essentially terrorist. On the contrary, as soon as we gained a decisive victory, we renounced the death penalty without a day’s delay. Nevertheless any attempt on the part of the Entente or its Russian lackeys to resume their old policies of strangling the Soviet Republic will force us to reintroduce the terror. We do not bind our hands. But our duty is to show that, once victory is achieved, we renounce all the exceptional laws which all the capitalist states are at the present moment applying in all their rigour.”