RUSSIA’S RED PARLIAMENT MEETS IN THRONE ROOM OF FORMER YEARS

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6849, 2 March 1929, Page 6

RUSSIA’S RED PARLIAMENT MEETS IN THRONE ROOM OF FORMER YEARS

MOSCOW, Feb. L

In tie stately Hall of St. Andrew, attached to the Great Kremlin Palace and formerly the throne room of Muscovite Tsars, meets Russia's Bed Parliament, the All-Union Soviet Central Executive Committee (generally abbreviated to Tsik, from the initial Eussian letters of its title). Even familiarity doos not detract from the dramatic symbolism and pageantry of this combination.

The half barbaric, half Byzantine splendour of tho throne room, with its vaulted ceiling, its high pillars, its profuse gilded scroll-work ornamentation, remains, even though the throne has given way to a prosiac dais for tho use of the presidium of the congress and traces of wear and tear are beginning to appear in parts of the palace architecture. And the Tsik is quite as definitely something new and unique, quite unlike any parliamentary body in western Europe.

Admission to Palace. * . One enters the massive enclosure of the Kremlin and gains admission to the palace after twice presenting credentials to attentive but courteous sentries. The Soviet delegates sit in rows in the body of the former throne room, faced the raised dais on which sit perhaps a dozen members of the presidium of the congress, while the speaker of the moment stands on a somewhat lower elevation and delivers his remarks before a radio-transmitter. On the left side of the hall, on the same level with the delegates but separated from them by a railing, are spaces reserved for the accommodation of the Soviet and foreign press. The first feature of the sessions of the Tsik which would probably impress an experienced parliamentary reporter from another country is the absence of forensic training on the part of the great majority of the delegates. The Soviet Executive Committee is lprgely made up of actual workers and peasants, who come to Moscow from their factories or farms two or three times a year for the brief sessions of the body and wbo are usually quite untrained in public speaking.

Bound by Party Discipline^ The deliberations of the “Bed Parliament,’ ’ are guided by a presiding officer, who may be Mikhail Kalinin, President of the Eussian Soviet Republic, or the President of one of the associated Soviet Republics, Ukraine, White Russia, Trans-Caucasia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. This presiding officer allots the order and time of the speakers, puts questions to a vote and generally fulfills some of the functions of the speaker of a foreign parliament. The divisions and party challenges which one .would have .noted in the

supreme legislative bodies of Great Britain and America, France and Germany are conspicuous by their absence in this Soviet legislature. This is quite understandable, in view of the fact that the majority of the members are Communists, bound by party discipline to vote as a unit, while the non-party members are in full accord with the general programme and purposes of the ruling Communist Party. In the spacious Hall of St. George, where the names of the officers and regiments, recipients of tho Cross of St. George, the highest pre-war Eussian military decoration are still engraved on the walls, the writer talked with several members of the Tsik at its last session. They were easy to identify because of their red badges, with the inscription “Member of Tsik.’’ Much Taken for Granted.

In the course of a few intervals between the sessions of tho Soviet assembly it proved possible to form casual acquaintanceships with a genial worker from one of the factories.of the Lena coalfields concession, in the Urals, with a peasant from the Glukhoy district of northern Ukrainia, with a woman agricultural labourer from Karelia, near the frontier of Finland, and a woman worker from the textilo mills of Serpukhov. One did not find in these typically proletarian legislators, any very exhaustive grasp of the details of the decrees which they had enacted. However, the appeal of these Soviet sessions in tho Kremlin to the imagination of the Eussian masses should not bo discounted merely because most of the rank-and-file members are inclined to take the legislative projects which are submitted to them pretty much for granted. The most simple and obvious impression to be derived from visiting a session of the Soviet assembly, that here aTC representatives of the Russian poor and disinherited classes installed, bv the judgment of history, in tho seats hitherto reserved for the Tsar and his nobles, happens, in this case, to be. the most significant.