Vladimir Lenin had a critical and distrustful view of lawyers. In a 1905 letter to comrades, Lenin referred to lawyers as "intellectualist scum" who must be "kept well in hand and made to toe the line" because of their potential to use "dirty tricks" against the revolutionary movement. He saw lawyers as agents of the ruling classes, primarily serving bourgeois interests rather than the proletariat. While he acknowledged that lawyers could have some instrumental value in defending revolutionaries by exposing false charges, Lenin generally viewed them with disdain and suspicion as defenders of the old order rather than true advocates of justice. The Bolsheviks, Lenin's party, viewed the courts and legal system not as impartial arbiters of justice but as tools of class struggle and instruments of repression for the ruling class. Defense attorneys were seen as remnants of the bourgeois past, often equated with mercenaries or swindlers working against the revolution. Lenin stressed the importance of revolutionary legal systems that suppress enemies and safeguard proletarian power rather than preserve bourgeois legality. Thus, Lenin's statements and writings reflect a cautious and adversarial stance toward lawyers and the traditional legal profession, seeing them as largely counter-revolutionary and promoting bourgeois class interests, while pragmatically allowing limited tactical use of lawyers when beneficial to revolutionary aims.