"'Recall the French Revolution and the struggle between the Vendée and the National Convention. . . . the troops of the Convention committed terrible acts—terrible from the point of view of a particular human being. But the acts committed by the troops of the Convention can only be understood in the light of class analysis. They are justified by history because they were committed by a progressive class [(прогрессивный класс)] that was sweeping its path clean of the survivals of feudalism and popular ignorance. The same thing is happening today. You, too, should have understood this.'"The twenty-six-year-old Ivar Tenisovich Smilga, "the highest-ranking commissar in the Red Army" and public prosecutor at the 1919 show trial of forty-seven-year-old Filipp Kuzmich Mironov, as quoted at Yuri Slezkine, The house of government: a saga of the Russian revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 174. Russian from Teodor. Shanin, V. P. Danilov, and N. Tarkhova, Filipp Mironov: Tikhiĭ Don v 1917-1921 gg., Rossii︠a︡. XX vek (Moskva: Mezhdunarodnyĭ Fond "Demokratii︠a︡", 1997), 422 (document no. 276, dated 5 October 1919).
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