Aron notes that Lenin did not rely on "an objective course of history" to guide his actions and often violated both Marx's theory and his own former statements. Noting the role of state terror in the USSR, Aron noted that both Oliver Cromwell and Maximilien de Robespierre used terror. As an example of state terror Aron that more than half of the delegates to the XVII congress of Soviet Communist Party (1934) were declared "enemies of the people" in years of "big terror". Almost all party veterans were discharged during the mass "cleanings" of 1936-1938. The majority of these veterans were executed or sent to the Gulag. They admitted their own "guilt" during the "Moscow trials", often after torture.