The sentences turned out to be too light, and they made hardly any use at all of the progressive principle of forced labor. In February, 1918, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Comrade Lenin, demanded that the number of places of imprisonment be increased and that repression of criminals be intensified, and in May, already going over to concrete guidance, he gave instructions that the sentence for bribery must be not less than ten years of prison and ten years of forced labor in addition, i.e., a total of twenty years. This scale might seem pessimistic at first: would forced
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