"The old law is: kill or be killed. But for us it is nonetheless something higher and less cruel than what has existed through the ages, for it is translated as follows: Break the past of lies, oppression, exploitation, authority, so that the future shall belong to the free workers in a free society. Crush this handful of backward-looking reactionaries - sixty-six, one hundred or three hundred, what does it matter! - in order to spare the tens of thousands of workers whom they will slaughter if they come out on top. Crush this incipient reaction at whatever cost, because if it were to triumph even for a moment it would be a calamity for the whole of humanity.

And then let those who have not lived through these hours of civil war, let those who - workers and ‘revolutionaries’ - are living peacefully in bourgeois servility, cast the first stone!"

Victor Serge, living through the counter-revolutionary assault on Communist-controlled Petrograd in 1919