Double standard

He [Trotsky] maintains a double standard throughout his diary, using one set of values for his side and another for the enemy. ...

... Trotsky not only takes the trouble to record Lenin's complicity in Ekaterinburg but also goes on to justify it: "The decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Czar's family was needed not only to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks, to show them there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin." ... This entry is sandwiched in between entries revealing Trotsky's anxiety about the fate of his son Seryozha, a nonpolitical engineer who had been arrested by Stalin simply because Trotsky was his father. Trotsky thinks this is barbarous, which it was, and refers to Seryozha as "an innocent bystander," which he was, but it doesn't occur to him that the late Czar might have considered his fourteen-year-old son another innocent bystander, not to mention his four young daughters and the family servants.

--Dwight Macdonald, "Trotsky, Orwell, and Socialism", The New Yorker March 28, 1959