Purpose
The stated purpose of the Red Terror was to eliminate counter-revolutionaries who belonged to former "ruling classes". Martin Latsis, chief of the Ukrainian Cheka, explained in the newspaper Red Terror:
Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.
Vladimir Lenin, writing in Pravda, criticised Latsis for this comment, saying that he had gone to "absurd lengths" and that "He wanted to say that Red terror meant the forcible suppression of exploiters who attempted to restore their rule".
Grigory Zinoviev declared in mid-September 1918: "To overcome of our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated."
Read more about this topic: Red Terror
Famous quotes containing the word purpose:
“Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“... my one aim and concentrated purpose shall be and is to show that women can learn, can reason, can compete with men in the grand fields of literature and science ... that a woman can be a woman and a true one without having all her time engrossed by dress and society.”
—M. Carey Thomas (1857–1935)
“The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)