Nikita Khrushchev lifted the lid on Stalinist repressions under the slogan of returning to “Leninist norms.” The ideologues of the new course of the party did not reject these norms directly; they cleverly substituted for them the formula of “a return to Leninist norms of party and state life,” and also to the norms so openly violated during the years of socialist legality of the 1930s. This substitution was not really a conscious deception. It was, rather, the personal conviction of Nikita Khrushchev regarding the superiority of communist ideology, of the planned economy, and the particular kind of legality that, during V. I. Lenin’s time, was called “revolutionary,” and during the whole period up to 1991 was termed “socialist.” At the beginning of the 1960s learned doctors of legal science carried on arguments, in the pages of Izvestia and elsewhere, about whether the presumption of innocence was a universal principle of law or an invention of “bourgeois propaganda.”.