We will secure peace, over the corpses of the counterrevolutionary command staff if necessary. - Nikolai Krylenko

After two decades of building socialism in the USSR there is no reason for anybody to be a homosexual.

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".

In the absence of a criminal code, a court might give a reprimand for a punch in the nose in Ryazan, while the sentence in Tula might be shooting.