penalties. According to Clause I of the decree on speculation,
" a person guilty of selling, storing or keeping with a view to sell,
articles of food monopolized by the Commonwealth, if he is doing
this as a trade, will be punished by imprisonment for a term not
less than ten years with the hardest forced labour, and by con-
fiscation of all his goods." Clause 2 says: "A person guilty of
selling, storing or keeping with a view to sell, articles of food at
prices higher than the established ones, if he does this as a trade,
will be punished by imprisonment for a term of not less than five
years, and by the confiscation of all or part of his goods."
Clause 3 says: "A person guilty of selling, storing or keeping with
a view to sell, other'articles the price of which has been fixed and
is subject to control, if he does it as a trade, will be punished by
imprisonment for a term of not less than three years, etc."
Clause 4 says: " If he does not drive a trade (but does so occasion-
ally), he will be punished by imprisonment for a term of not less
than six months." Similar penalties are imposed on those who
collect provision cards with a view to trade with them.
These Draconian measures were mitigated in practice by the necessity of having recourse to lawyers, who had received their education under the old regime. The majority of the personnel of the higher courts had to be drawn from that class, and did what they could to soften the asperities of Soviet legislation.
In the same way Soviet legislators had to steer a middle course as regards private law; in 1918 law as to marriage, family relations and succession was cast in a new shape. As regards marriage the chief change was the abolition of the contrast between legitimate and illegitimate unions. The only difference was one of registration: some people might think it worth while to register their convention as to sexual relations, others did not attach importance to such routine ; the consequences as to family status were about the same. Consorts kept their separate goods and had equally the right of protection and duty of maintenance as to the children. In case of disagreement in the conduct of their children's affairs, they have to apply to the local court. The latter may deprive either of them of the right of supervision in case of misuse. The wife, or woman living as such, may claim maintenance from the man with whom she has been living, if she is unable to maintain herself. As to the bringing up of children, she is allowed to claim assistance from the putative father, and if she has had such relations with several men so that fatherhood is uncertain, she enjoys the additional advantage of being able to claim contributions from each one of them. Succession is abolished. No one can dispose of his fortune by will, nor do the children inherit to the exclusion of other relations; after the death of a person his or her fortune is distributed among relations within certain degrees according to the measure of their needs. Their claims are preferred to the claims of the creditors of the deceased.
It is needless to add that Soviet legislation uprooted the rules as to contract of service. All forms of service are considered as forms of servility, as varieties of exploitation. Everyone must depend on the work of his hands and combination is entirely a matter of public law. It appears in the shape of professional unions industrial and rural alike, or in the shape of Soviet rule substituted for the old conception of the State. Members of the Soviet Republic are comrades in work, though not in service, and it is for the Soviet Commonwealth to assign them their shares in work and produce.
Here are some characteristic passages from an article in the official organ of the Commissariat of Justice ' :
" The project of the Provisional Government accepted as a basis of the legal order of industrial undertakings the fiction of a free bilateral contract." Under the rule of the Soviets " the industrial undertaking ceases to be governed by formal conventions or con- tracts and by one-sided declarations of the will of employers. The collective contract . . . loses the character of a bilateral convention and becomes an objective rule of conduct." This principle was first proclaimed as an exception in the case of the establishment of a tariff of remuneration in the metal workers' trade. It was sub- sequently recognized to be the normal arrangement of the status of
'A. Yablonsky, The Labour Constitution in the "Proletarian " Revolution and Law, 5-6 issue, Oct. 15 1918.
workmen. There can be no more talk of " hire " and " service "; the conception of " cooperation " taking their place. " The sense of duty and of responsibility arising from it has dictated the following clauses to the Petrograd metal workers, when they constituted their tariff without the employers. Clause 16: ' When the working man receives a definite guarantee as to his earnings, he is bound to guarantee a corresponding amount of work in the shape of a definite form of production. Clause 23: In case of evident loafing or of premeditated slowness the workman is to be moved into a lower class and can even be dismissed.' ' The juridical life of the working men is being unified by movements in two directions towards combining local undertakings into one common State economy and by uniting the interests of separate professional groups on the lines of a common class consciousness.' "
Education and Religion. Another subject of primary impor- tance considered by the Central Executive Committee in its fifth session in conjunction with trade unions was that of the proletar- ian school system. There was no discussion, and the conclusions of a committee for which Comrade M. Pokrovsky acted as reporter were approved en bloc. The report laid stress on the necessity of getting rid of all varieties in the curriculum of schools, produced by the sinister interests of the dominant class of the old regime. The old schools had been diversified not only by horizontal par- titions as lower-middle and high-schools, but also by vertical sub-divisions as special types of humanistic, modern side (cf. Realschule), technical, ecclesiastical schools. This tendency towards specialization served the purpose of splitting up the compact and powerful mass of working men into a number of groups on which the dominant class could practice the divide et impera principle. The true educational ideal was to train all the youth of the country on the same lines, leading them through the various forms and stages of application of human energy to productive work. A course of nine years, beginning at the age of eight, would be necessary to achieve this object. Of course the old methods by which " gentlefolks' " children were taught to scrawl on paper would have to be discarded. The orientation of the school should be directed towards preparing for a life in which manual work was honoured and not despised. The aim should be to educate men able on leaving school to take up intelligently and successfully any kind of task. The curriculum would be a repro- duction on a small scale of the cultural history of mankind. Astronomy would be shown to have guided the men of old in their observations of the seasons on which agriculture depends ; zoology would be taught in connexion with the tending 'of domestic animals, botany on the live specimens of plants. The manage- ment of the school should be an introduction to civil life, the principle of collective labour permeating all details, methods of old-fashioned subjection and discipline being entirely discarded, and the school should be constituted as a " commune " and the senior pupils should take part in its administration together with the teachers and the representatives of the working popula- tion of the district. Punishments would not be necessary in these educational communes; order would be kept up by the sense of responsibility on the part of the pupils.
A quantity of literature was produced in Soviet Russia to spread the notions of the Proletcult (proletarian culture). In order to give an idea of this stuff, one or two extracts may be given from a paper by Comrade Bobrinsky 2 :
" We have to proceed towards freedom through the iron yoke of proletarian dictatorship, towards equality through rationing ac- cording to class, towards fraternity through civil war. Proletarian science becomes in practice a weapon in the struggle for power and economic existence. Science becomes politics. The bourgeois contrast between knowledge and politics, between science and ac- tion, gives way a synthesis for the first time : science is turned into the political force of the proletariat, and proletarian politics is turned into science. . . . Natural science is combined into a unity with social science. . . . The old disputes about humanistic (classical) and realistic education, the old criticism directed against the estrangement from life, against the academic character of education find a simple and radical solution in the school of labour. . . . Tech- nology has acquired a place of equality with other sciences and it serves as a transition from natural science to sociology. . . . Tech- nology becomes the principal science in the system of historical materialism. According to historical materialism all changes in
2 " The October Upheaval and the Dictatorship of the Pro- letariat," pp. 163 ff.
