“We are sometimes up against a flat refusal to apply this law rigidly. One People's Judge told me flatly that he could never bring himself to throw someone in jail for stealing four ears. What we're up against here is a deep prejudice, imbibed with their mother's milk… a mistaken belief that people should be tried in accordance not with the Party's political guidelines but with considerations of "higher justice."”

— Nikolai Krylenko

Krylenko criticizing the leniency of some Soviet officials who objected to the infamous "five ears law". Quoted in Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives, page 258.

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Nikolai Krylenko7

Russian revolutionary, politician and chess organiser 1885–1938

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