his hands, as regards the truth or justice of the verdict. Civil
law is decentralizing, anarchistic, derived from a fiction of free-
dom, while public law aims at concentration and cooperation,
and that is the law suitable to a socialistic commonwealth.

Another article on Soviet jurisprudence dwells on the total
transformation of criminal law, and the author is not less nihil-
istic in his appreciation of this branch of legal organization
than his colleague Hochberg was as regards private law; indeed,
one branch is not more necessary than the other:

" There can be no idea of retribution, because the modern scientific
view does not recognize any free or responsible will. Detcrminists
cannot build their law on the idea of punishment. It is certain that
crime is the product of social conditions, and therefore cannot be
imputed to any single individual. This l>eing so, there is no reason
to despair of the disappearance of crime and of the coercive law
directed against it. Menger halted half way: he thought that in-
fringements of rights are to some extent the result of human na-
ture, of inherent self-will. But serious infringements of rights pro-
ceed from class distinctions and class antagonisms. There will be
no burglary or theft when there is no private property protected by
law: all serious motives for homicide and other crimes of violence
will disappear when men are all comrades and there is no wealth or
privilege to excite hatred. Whatever occasions there may remain
for inordinate self-will will be rare anomalies and can be treated as
negligible quantities."

In spite of all these enchanting perspectives it is recognized
that the stage of a lawless Elysium has not yet been reached,
and in concession to human frailty certain prohibitions and
rules have to be maintained in the epoch of transition. This
epoch may last for a long time, because the new order can be
secured only by psychological transformation, and psychological
processes take many years to mature.

Meanwhile speculators, traders, hooligans and counter-
revolutionary agitators have to be coerced, and this is the chief
business of popular courts, reinforced in dangerous cases by the
ruthless action of the Extraordinary Commission. Trade was
made a punishable offence and threatened with most severe



RUSSIA



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.



332



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social life are derived from the relations of Society to production.
Everyone knows that, but it is not sufficiently recognized that

thfdelef Man V he eV ' Ut f i0n I his - tor y is en ' irelv dependent on
the development of means of production and that changes in the
latter are conditioned by changes in technique."

It is appropriate to mention here the policy of the Soviets as
regards religion, and, more especially, as regards the Orthodox
Church, as its foundations are to be found in a profound con-
trast of cultural conceptions. The matter is well illustrated in a
paper contributed to The Octobrist Upheaval by Comrade N.
Lukin (Antonov). He begins by ridiculing the notion that the
separation of the Church from the State meant emancipation for
the Church from secular control coupled with the right to accumu-
late property and to influence public opinion on similar lines to
those which obtain in Belgium. The revolution put religious
associations on the same level as other common law associations,
but deprived them of the right of holding property and of
other privileges of juridical persons. As a natural consequence
the Orthodox Church became one of the main instruments of
counter-revolutionary agitation. The Council called together in
Moscow did not attract any considerable attention on the part
of workmen and peasants, but it was crowded with representa-
tives of the old aristocracy, bureaucracy and counter-revolu-
tionary " intelligentsia." The newly elected Patriarch Tikhon
excommunicated the authors of the decree of disestablishment
and the Council denounced it as an attack on the national faith
and the religious institutions of Russia, not omitting to mention
that the clergy was being deprived of the means of subsistence.
In view of such an irreconcilable attitude the Soviet power is
bound to wage a ruthless war against the Orthodox Church. It
is armed against it by Clause 5 of the decree of Separation for-
bidding all ecclesiastical ceremonies and acts directed against the
Commonwealth. But it must not be forgotten that even apart
from the conspiracies and direct risings, religion in general is an-
tagonistic to the social conceptions of the new order. Even in
its present state the Church is able to support ignorance among
the mass of the people and to divert the proletariat from the
struggle for an " earthly paradise " by making them dream
about a " paradise in heaven." The example of France and of
America shows that the clergy is preaching war against social
democracy with no less fervour because it is deprived of those
powerful means of influencing men's brains which are at its dis-
posal in countries still maintaining State religions. In creating
a new world the proletariat stands in need of a complete and
harmonious scientific outlook.

Foreign and Home Policy. The Sixth Congress of Soviets met
on Nov. 6 I9 i8. Nineteen hundred and fourteen delegates assem-
bled m Moscow, of whom 829 were Communists; 71 had been
registered as sympathizing with Communism, and 2 as Revolu-
tionary Communists, while 6 were declared to belong to the
Social Revolutionary party, i to the Maximalists, 3 to no party.
The president Sverdlov expressed his firm conviction that distri-
bution of seats corresponded fully and correctly to the interests
wide masses of the working population of Russia." The
debates were overshadowed by two main facts by the victory
of the Western Allies and by the appalling food crisis.

Lenin, while admitting that the situation was extremely
dangerous, because Communist Russia had to reckon henceforth
not with two belligerents engaged in a struggle for existence but
with the united front of the victorious Entente, thought it augured
well for the progress of the world revolution:

'i i?w pl - ete victorv of a Socialist revolution," he said, " is
unthinkable in any one country. It requires at least the cooperation
U 3?k adva "? ed ^"ntries, and Russia is not one of then? This"
s why the question as to the expansion of the revolution into other

of th'/n^ f ur S Kf CeSS '," r=P ulsin g imperialism becomes one
of the principal problems of the Revolution. . . We must raise
the proletariat of all countries."

He dwelt on the benefits conferred by the Brest Litovsk peace
which gave Russia breathing-space and the possibility of recon-
structing her army. Now the aim was to carry the contagion of
the revolution into Central and Western Europe:

." We can see already how the fire has broken out in most coun-
tries m America, in Germany, in England. ... The peace which



the rapacious imperialists of England and France are going to in-
met on conquered Europe will be a more humiliating and crushing
one than the treaty of Brest Litovsk, but this very peace will b!
heir undoing because it will rouse the revolutionary feelings of
the world proletariat. We are not living in Central Africa but
in civilized countries in the twentieth century. They are raising
a Chinese wall against Bolshevism, but Bolshevism will pass
countries " SpTKld its infection among the working men of all

In unison with Lenin, the president, Sverdlov, declared that
before six months had passed they would see Soviet rule tri-
umphant not only in Hungary, in Germany, in Austria, but in
France and Great Britain.

The problem of supplies was to be solved by expropriation in
the villages. Zinoviev explained that the plan of raising the
poor peasants against the well-to-do ones was being carried out
ith energy and success. A Congress of the " poor folk " in
Petrograd had been attended by 16,000 delegates; they had
resolved to organize a special " poor folk " army consisting of
two men from each village. In the Novgorod Government alone
2,000 poor folk " committees had been formed:

I,,- V he . ir Chi f f *T ' S to . dnve a ^dge into village life . . to
kindle class struggle, to kindle the sacred hatred of the poor folk
against the ncfi We say ... the 'tight-fists' must be

strangled as we said before: strangle the bourgeois in the towns. .
We know perfectly well that we cannot carry out a proletarian
revolutmn unless we crush the tight-fists ' in the villages^crush
them in the economic and, if necessary, in the physical sense."

The Congress adopted a resolution in conformity with Zino-
viev's proposal, the gist of which was that in order to get rid of
strife and confusion produced by dualism in the villages it was
necessary to assign to the " poor folk committees " instituted by
the decree of July 1 1 1918, the superior authority and to carry out
a reorganization of rural Soviets on the pattern of town Soviets
turning them into true organs of Soviet power.

The seventh Congress met on Dec. 5 1919. Of the 1,109 dele-
gates with power to vote, 890 were registered as Communists and
34 as belonging to no party. In the course of the Congress some
representatives of the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks
,Dan, Martov and others) took part in the debates, declaring
their adherence to the cause of the Socialist Republic under
Soviet rule, but criticizing certain methods of Soviet administra-
tion. The atmosphere of the Congress was dominated by the
elated feelings produced by the victories over Kolchak and
Demkin. They were extolled as triumphs over the Entente.
Lenin admitted in his speech that the progress of the World
Revolution had been slower and more complicated than had
been expected, but he maintained that on the whole the previ-
sions of the Bolsheviks had been justified by the course of events
The miracle of the victory of helpless and backward Russia over
the all-powerful Entente was traced by him to the instinctive
sympathy of the working-classes of Great Britain, France and
Italy towards their brothers in Russia. As a result of this feeling
it was impossible for the Allies to expose their troops to a deci-
sive conflict with the Red army; symptoms of fraternization had
begun to appear in the ranks of the western soldiers and the
Entente was obliged to withdraw them. The hope to combine the
minor border states against Red Russia had also miscarried, and
disillusionment had been brought by the collapse of the White
Guards equipped by the " imperialistic wild beasts " of England
whose greed and craving for world supremacy was worse than
that of the Germans. Resolutions of the Soviet greeted the toil-
ing masses in all countries, invited them to struggle against
bourgeois Imperialism and declared the Peace of Versailles a
shameless attempt to establish the domination of the Allies,
to divide the world into conquerors and conquered, into great
and small powers, without taking heed of self-determination.

Trotsky gave a glowing account of the victorious Red army.
He described it as an exact reflection of the Soviet Republic. It
was built up on the principle of class domination, the ruling class
being that of town workmen:

" They form about 15-18 % of the army, but they lead it on ac-
count ot their greater consciousness, their stronger solidarity the
higher quality of their revolutionary mettle. The responsible posts
>1 commissars are occupied almost exclusively by workers of the



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333



Communist party. In every regiment, every battalion, every com-
pany is to be found a communistic cell. In this way a new communistic
order of ' Samurai ' has been formed. And the army is not merely
a fighting organization, it is a political school the like of which has
not been known to the world."

Trotsky prided himself particularly on the incessant political
propaganda. "In the beginning we had not a single elementary
school in the army now we have 3,800; before the 1st of Jan. we
had 32 clubs: now we have 1,315. Before the 1st of Jan. we had
not a single mobile library: now we have 3,392."

As regards officers and other specialists drafted into the Red
army from the cadres of the old Tsarist army, Trotsky main-
tained that thousands of them had reconciled themselves with
their new position and were faithfully serving the new order. He
was contemplating the institution of one man's rule instead of the
system of commanders watched over by two commissars.

Economic Problems. The most serious discussions took place
in connexion with the problems of food and fuel-supplies. Tsuru-
pa, the People's Commissar at the head of the Narkhoskom (the
Commissariat of People's economics) gave an account of the
working of bread monopoly. All corn supplies had been national-
ized and the system was enforced by charging each province with
a fixed contribution which was subsequently distributed among
the districts of each province, while the districts assessed the
villages with quotas according to estimation. The whole assess-
ment of the country was reckoned at 324 million poods of corn of
every kind: of the 30% which were charged to the first quarter
some 60 millions were expected to come in by Dec. i. This did
not quite correspond to the demand, but as some provinces were
not under the control of the Soviet power, the assessment might
be said to have been carried out satisfactorily in the greater part
of the country as regards corn. This did not mean, however,
that the supply of corn was secured for those who needed it.
Many thousands of poods lay stored and rotting at the stations,
because there was no transport to convey them to their places of
destination. As regards meat the situation was much worse.
Only 600,000 poods were available instead of the five million de-
livered in 1918; the cause was the great falling off of the numbers
of cattle held by the peasants. Butter and fats were also at a dis-
count: the commissariat could not dispose of more than 300,000
poods for the whole of Russia, and that meant famine in respect
of fats. Of fish roughly 75% of the normal supply had been
caught but the transport conditions were badly hampering its
distribution. The proposal of the Commissariat was to extend
the State monopoly and the coercive assessment to all food prod-
ucts and it was adopted by the Congress.

As far as fuel was concerned, the situation had grown to be
catastrophic. The loss of Baku and of the Donets coal-mines
had largely reduced the quantity available. Instead of 500,-
000,000 poods of naphtha, e.g. Soviet Russia disposed of 80
million. It continued to exist only because all private stores and
supplies had been confiscated. Things got better when the roads
to the Donets and to Ural were cleared, but the disorganization
of the transport told heavily on the distribution of fuel. As a
matter of necessity Russia had to fall back once more on wood
fuel, although the adaptation to a new system of heating involved
immense losses. The first requirement was to provide material
for the railways and that was being gradually achieved by means
of labour conscription. As for domestic heating, its needs were so