Stalin on repressions in his political report to the 16th Congress of the VKP(b) on 27 June 1930

Strange as it may seem, the face of our own day is reflected not only in the writings of Lenin, but in those of Stalin too. Take, for example, the following report: the Political Report of the Central Committee to the 16th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 27 June 1930.

In this document, published in the newspaper Pravda, Stalin uses the word "repressions" three times. Read on: do these words not strike you as painfully familiar quotations from the political speeches and discourse of the present day?

"…our difficulties are not the difficulties of petty and accidental 'mishaps', but the difficulties of the class struggle. …our class enemies lurk behind our difficulties; these difficulties are compounded by the desperate resistance of the dying classes of our country, by the support given to those classes from abroad, by the presence of bureaucratic elements in our own institutions, and by the presence of uncertainty and inertia in certain layers of our party. From this it follows, thirdly, that in order to overcome the difficulties it is necessary, above all, to repel the attacks of the capitalist elements, to crush their resistance and thus to clear the road for swift advance. From this it follows, finally, that the very character of our difficulties, being difficulties of growth, gives us the opportunities necessary for crushing our class enemies. But in order to use these opportunities and turn them into reality, in order to crush the resistance of the class enemies and overcome the difficulties, there is only one means: to organise an offensive against the capitalist elements along the whole front, and to isolate the opportunist elements in our own ranks, who hinder the offensive, dart in panic from side to side and sow in the party uncertainty of victory. (Applause.)"

At the word "applause" one is, of course, moved to tears. And then comes a very simple formula, which very soon found its reflection in the legal science and political journalism of those years, and in general acquired a life of its own, embodied in reality:

"Some comrades think that repressions form the main thing in the advance of socialism, and that if repressions do not increase, then there is no advance. Is this correct? Of course, it is not. Repressions in the sphere of socialist construction are a necessary element of the offensive, but an auxiliary element, not the main one."

It does not matter that Stalin here calls repressions a non-principal element; what matters is that with this speech he lifts the taboo on the use of the word, a taboo that existed not only in the Soviet press but in the Tsarist one as well. And he lifts the taboo not only on its use, but on its interpretation and further terminological development. As for what followed, we are all aware of that.