On April 7, 1935, the Soviet government issued a decree that was unprecedented in the history of world civilization. The decree stipulated that children over the age of twelve who committed crimes such as pickpocketing were to be punished in the same way as adults, even by death. They were punished in the same way as adults, even by death.
The people were shocked by this terrible decree. Knowing that Stalin’s courts were cold, ruthless, and lawless, people were terrified for their children, fearing that they would easily be falsely accused, or simply the victims of a misunderstanding. Even those who held prominent positions in the Stalinist bureaucracy were preoccupied.
The government played a cynical trick to soften the terrible impression the decree had created. It threatened that the new decree would be aimed primarily at street children who stole grain silos from farms and train cars. ……
According to Marx, the phenomenon of crime is caused by the social environment, and it is society that creates criminals. If this view is correct, then it is a merciless verdict against the entire Stalinist system, which turned even children into criminals, and so many of them that the government had no choice but to extend to children the same laws that had been applied to adult criminals. The fact that Stalin imposed the death penalty on children eighteen years after the founding of the Soviet state painted the clearest picture of Stalin’s own true moral character.
The new decree was announced. I was abroad. Soviet diplomats in foreign countries were outraged by this appalling decree of Stalin’s dictatorship. Stalin, however, said that he only laughed at the accusations of world public opinion. A Soviet ambassador told me that he had to advise his subordinates to cancel the press conference in order to prevent foreign journalists from asking questions about the disgraceful decree.
The heads of the Communist parties in various countries were put in a similarly embarrassing situation. At the Congress of the Union of Teachers of French in August 1935, questions about the decree were put to the delegates of the Communist Party. On the first day, unable to find an adequate explanation, they simply denied that the Soviet Union would adopt such a decree. But the next day, after they were shown the newspaper Kommersant, which contained the full text of the decree, they responded by using a passage from the decree without any explanation: “During the communist period, children were highly conscious, well educated, and fully responsible for their actions.
It is even more difficult to explain how such a humiliating decree could be published without any scruples, knowing that Stalin had always tried to keep the dark side of his society from the outside world. We know that. Even the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union, which he vehemently denied, was no secret to the world. Under his rule, millions of prisoners languishing in Siberian camps were locked behind bars without any trial, and the Soviet newspapers did not say a word about them. As for the death penalty in the Soviet Union, the fact is that for every death sentence handed down by a court of law and published, there were at least a hundred more secret executions.
I did not know about this barbaric decree until I returned to Moscow.
I knew that as early as 1932, when hundreds of thousands of homeless children, driven by hunger, were pouring into railway stations and big cities, Stalin issued a secret decree that anyone caught in the act of robbing food warehouses and pickpocketing trains, as well as anyone infected with the disease will be shot. Such executions were carried out in secret. As a result of these mass killings and other “administrative measures,” the problem of street children was solved before the summer of 1934. It was solved in a purely Stalinist way.
The present decree is not at all aimed at street children, because it is no longer necessary. It was intended to serve another purpose altogether, and it was obvious, because at that time Stalin was using torture to subdue the old “comrades” in order to bring them to the First Moscow Trial Conference, which was to be held in 1936.
As I have already mentioned, Zinoviev and Kamenev once satisfied Stalin’s thirst for revenge by admitting “moral and political” responsibility for the Kirov murders at the secret trial in 1935. But this only saved them for a while. In order to eliminate both of them and other worthy ministers within the party, Stalin now wanted Zinoviev and Kamenev to confess unequivocally that they had been the culprits in the conspiracy to kill Kirov and that they wanted to kill Stalin. In order to force Zinoviev and Kamenev to confess to this crime, and to do so at the trial conference, it was necessary to find the weakest and most sensitive breakthrough point in the hearts of these men, and to decide on the appropriate means of coercing the confessions.
The breakthrough point was found: the attachment of the old Bolsheviks to their children and grandchildren. In fact, this kind of threat to incriminate their children had already been used once by the opposition leaders, in preparation for the secret trials of 1935. But the opposition leaders did not believe in such threats at the time, believing that Stalin would not dare to risk universal condemnation. Now, a newspaper containing a government decree was placed in front of all the imprisoned opponents. The decree instructed the court to use all the provisions of the Penal Code against children and to punish them with any punishment, including the death penalty. The opposition leaders now realized that they had underestimated Stalin. Their children were in real danger of death. Thus, the new decree entered Stalin’s torture arsenal as the most effective trump card for moral oppression and psychological offensive.
The Central Secretary, Nikolai Yerov, personally ordered that the text of the decree must be placed on the interrogation table by the interrogators at every interrogation.
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