I now conclude, comrades judges. The last hour is approaching, the hour of reckoning for these people who have committed grave crimes against our great country. It is the last hour of reckoning for these people who took up arms against our dearest and most beloved, against the beloved leaders of our Party and our country, against Stalin, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, Zhdanov, Postyshev, Kossior and other leaders of our land of victorious, growing and flourishing, new, socialist society. A sad and shameful end awaits these people who were once in our ranks, although they were never distinguished for either staunchness or loyalty to the cause of socialism.
Just a few words more. Some of the accused tried to draw a parallel with the historical past, with the period of the Narodnaya Volya. They tried to compare some people with the heroic terrorists who in the last century entered into combat with the terrible, cunning and ruthlessly cruel enemy, the tsarist government. In speaking of Bakayev, or perhaps of Smirnov, the name of Gershuni was mentioned here. This argument does not hold water.
That was a struggle waged by a handful of self-sacrificing enthusiasts against the gendarme giant; it was a fight in the interests of the people. We Bolsheviks have always opposed terrorism, but we must pay our tribute to the sincerity and heroism of the members of the Narodnaya Volya. Gershuni was not a Bolshevik, but he, too, fought against tsarism and not against the people.
You, however, a handful of downright counter-revolutionaries, representatives of the vanguard of the international counterrevolution, you took up arms against the vanguard of the world proletarian revolution! You took up arms against the liberty and happiness of the peoples. The comparison with the period of Narodnaya Volya terrorism is shameless. Filled with respect for the memory of those who in the times of the Narodnaya Volya sincerely and honestly, although employing, it is true, their own special, but always irreproachable methods, fought against the tsarist autocracy for liberty - I emphatically reject this sacrilegious parallel. I repeat, this parallel is out of place here. Before us are criminals, dangerous, hardened, cruel and ruthless towards our people, towards our ideals, towards the leaders of our struggle, the leaders of the land of Soviets, the leaders of the toilers of the whole world!
The enemy is cunning. A cunning enemy must not be spared. The whole people rose to its feet as soon as these ghastly crimes became known. The whole people is quivering with indignation and I, as the representative of the state prosecution, join my anger, the indignant voice of the state prosecutor, to the rumbling of the voices of millions!
I want to conclude by reminding you, comrades judges, of those demands which the law makes in cases of the gravest crimes against the state. I take the liberty of reminding you that it is your duty, once you find these people, all sixteen of them, guilty of crimes against the state, to apply to them in full measure those articles of the law which have been preferred against them by the prosecution.
I demand that dogs gone mad should be shot - every one of them!