On May 17, 1922, Lenin wrote to the People's Commissar of Justice Kursky regarding the draft of the first Soviet Criminal Code: "The court should not eliminate terror; to promise this would be self-deception or deception, but to substantiate and legalize it fundamentally, clearly, without falsehood and embellishment." There too is the method: to formulate as broadly as possible, leaving the application to "revolutionary legal consciousness and revolutionary conscience."
The formula overturns the European tradition: law was thought of as a boundary to state violence, here it becomes its formalization. The court does not limit terror but gives it procedural form.

From this premise grew specific constructions. Vague dispositions of political articles, where the composition was determined by intent. An analogy (Article 16 of the 1926 Criminal Code) allowed punishment for actions not directly provided for by the code. The replacement of "punishment" with "measures of social protection": the act was not evaluated, but the social danger of the person - origin, connections, past.

The court did not have a monopoly. Parallel extrajudicial bodies operated: the collegium of the Cheka, the special council of the OGPU and NKVD, the "troikas." A verdict could be an administrative decision.

Show trials added a pedagogical function. The confession of the accused became the main evidence, and the law of December 1, 1934, regarding terror cases abolished defense, cassation, and deferral of execution.
The system could not withstand the demands of "without embellishment." Stalinist justice returned the facade: the 1936 Constitution with its guarantees, adversarial ritual, legal rhetoric - with unchanged essence. The analogy was removed only in the codes of 1958-1960, but flexible political articles remained. The letter of 1922 remained the most honest description of the system that outlived its author.