“We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more”

“We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more” is attributed to Krylenko, Joseph Stalin’s commissar for justice. The line reduces execution to political theater: guilt is not the criterion, and the killing of the innocent is presented as especially useful because it can frighten the wider population.

Attribution and Context

The book places the statement in the rapid unsealing of Soviet history under Glasnost. After Mikhail Gorbachev called for the blank pages of history to be filled in and acknowledged hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalinism, public discussion began to confront the scale of the repression; the account notes that the actual numbers ran into the tens of millions. Krylenko’s words appear as one of the quotations used to make the violence of the system newly legible.

Political Meaning

The statement’s two-part construction first includes the guilty, then makes the innocent the more consequential target. That reversal strips punishment of any claim to justice: the innocent are not an unfortunate exception but a means of impressing and intimidating the masses. In the book’s account, the quotation became a pointed argument in discussions of Stalinism, alongside the so-called 5 percent theory, which treated even a small proportion of genuinely guilty prisoners as sufficient justification for mass arrests.

Role in the Reckoning

The line helps explain why the recovered record could alter public understanding so quickly. Once such statements could be repeated openly, repression was harder to describe as a sequence of isolated excesses or as the punishment of genuine offenders. The quotation condenses the broader indictment into a single admission: terror worked by making innocence no protection at all.