SOVIET AND MARRIAGE.

Putaruru Press, Volume IV, Issue 126, 1 April 1926, Page 1

SOVIET AND MARRIAGE.

OLD WIVES FOR NEW. A determined attemipt to eradicate the last vestiges of family life was made hy the Soviet Government in the Marriage Law proposals which it submitted, to the Moscow Central Committee. But the surviving forces of civilisation in Russia proved too strong even for the Moscow Dictators, and the proposals were defeated (writes the Riga correspondent of the Morning Post). After two days’ fierce debate the promoters of the Bill found arrayed against them not only the peasants, but also the women and the leading Soviet jurists. The existing Soviet Marriage Law of 1918 introduced civil marriage, and facilitatel divorce. Its avowed, object was to undermine both the Church and family life. In towns like Moscow to-day about two-thirds of the marriages registered are civil marriages, but in the country the overwhelming majority of the peasants have remained true to the Church. The extremists, who are chiefly concerned to strengthen the Bolshevist hold on the towns, deemed it opportune, to push home the attack on the Church, and proposed in effect to abolish marriage, in e thq accepted sense of the term. But they had reckoned neither with the peasants nor, above all, with the women. In the course of the debate, it was represented, that already the existing marriage law has led to all sorts of abuses. Xo sooner did a workman receive promotion in factory or Soviet than he immediately "began to look round for a new wife. One woman deputy declared:—As things are to-day, men and women are absolutely without any standard of conduct. Many a man has 20 wives; with one he lives for a week, with another he lives for a fortnight, and so on. Each of them perhaps has a child! This sort of thing is impossible. How are yen going to make a man like that maintain his children? You cannot pull ihs skin off his back. That is why the children are thrown out into the street; that is where the homeless children come from. Cases were cited in which, iindcr the " existing law. even peasants were beginning to yield to the temptation to exchange an elderly wife for a young one who could work harder and was also in. other regards more attractive.