Lenin’s Thoughts on Criminal Law

Lenin’s important exposition on safeguarding the political power and social and economic stability of the Soviet state and safeguarding the rights of the people. Before and after the October Revolution, Lenin used legal weapons, especially criminal law weapons, to fight against various kinds of rebels, enemy agents and economic criminals, and developed Marxist criminal law theory. The main contents are as follows: (1) The proletariat should apply the death penalty mercilessly to the revolutionary enemy. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, some people proposed that the abolition of death penalty should be included in the party’s program. Kautsky and his colleagues also ridiculed the application of the death penalty before the proletarian party won its victory. In this regard, Lenin pointed out that Kautsky had reached such a point that he could not think revolutionary and fell into vulgar opportunism to such an extent that he could not imagine that the revolutionary proletarian party could openly admit that the death penalty must be applied to anti revolutionaries before it won its victory. At the beginning of the victory of the October Revolution, in the face of counter revolutionary forces at home and abroad attempting to strangle the Soviet regime in its cradle, Lenin pointed out these enemies to the people and the enemies of socialism in order to defend the new power of the proletariat, the enemy of the laborer cannot forgive any attempt by any person or organ to seize any function of the state power, the Soviet regime will use all means available to suppress, until the use of force. Lenin severely criticized some people who opposed the death penalty and indulged in the behavior of the most heinous counter revolutionaries and stressed that no revolutionary government could do without death penalty, the whole question is only which class the government uses the death penalty as a weapon. This is proved by the experience of previous revolutionary struggles. He pointed out that the misfortune of the previous revolutions lies in the fact that the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses to mercilessly suppress the bad elements has not been sustained for a long time. In the process of drawing up “The Criminal Code of the Soviet Union” in 1922, Lenin put forward the concept of counter revolutionary crime and the issue of punishment. Lenin pointed out that any organization that publicized, encouraged or assisted a kind of organization would not recognize the Communist ownership which had replaced capitalism, and tried to use armed interference, blockade, espionage, etc. Those who overthrow the international bourgeoisie effect of Communist ownership by means of subsidizing newspapers and periodicals by violence shall be sentenced to capital punishment, and those whose circumstances are minor shall be deprived of their liberty or deported. (2) The criminal law is not only applicable to all kinds of reactionary forces, but also to specific criminal acts in economic fields such as corruption, bribery and theft. In 1918, Lenin pointed out that when the new revolutionary regime had not been consolidated, if we did not take the terrorist means of shooting on the spot against speculators, we would have achieved nothing. In “The Letter to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)”, he said, it is a shameful act for the Communist Party and revolutionaries not to shoot such corrupt criminals, but to impose ridiculously light punishment on them; in his “Current Task of the Soviet Regime”, he wrote that bribe takers and swindlers should be arrested and shot. After the establishment of the Soviet regime, Lenin repeatedly stressed the need to crack down on speculation and profiteering, pointed out that all laws on speculation should be re-examined and revised, and all acts of theft of public property should be declared. All acts that directly or indirectly, openly or secretly evade state supervision, supervision and calculation should be punished (in fact, they should be punished three times more severely than before). Only in this way can we ensure the development of national calculation and supervision, thus effectively consolidate the new Soviet regime and ensure the smooth progress of socialist construction. (3) The purpose of criminal law is the warning function of punishment. Lenin argued that the purpose of socialist penalty application is to stop the criminals from committing crimes again and warn others not to commit crimes by applying punishment to criminals. The warning function of punishment is not to see whether the punishment is severe or not, but to see whether there is someone missing the net. The important thing is not to severely punish crimes, but to make all crimes known to the public, that is, to achieve the social effect of crime prevention through punishment.