NEW FORM OF POLYGAMY

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16230, 3 January 1927, Page 9

NEW FORM OF POLYGAMY

RUSSIA'S NEW LAWS THE CLOCK PUT BACK MOSCOW. Nov. It The Soviet Russian Legislative Assembly, with only a single dissentient voice to-day. endorsed the proposals of the Government to abolish registration of marriages, the only legal tie that exists in Russian for matrimony. Thus marriage in Russia will henceforth only involve the little trouble and small expense of going to the marriage commissariat to record your marital condition on an identity card, which will be stamped for a few pence. Then you may live in ami out of a state of wedlock as frequently as you wish, and so long as there are no children you will not bo troubled by the courts. Jn the case of a divorce and there is the complication of children or the division of common property, then the courts must determine whether or not you have been married. EVIDENCE OF MARRIAGE The decision of the courts will be based on the following three points: Residence of a couple together for any period; maintenance for any period of a mutual household; evidence of conjugal relations. *A special committee is now sitting to deal with these points, and if pos siblc make them more specific, ii order to allow fewer loopholes for ar inconstant lnjsband who after a porioi of matrimony desires to change without any responsibility for the consequences. The one delegate who opposed the project in its entirety, even aflci Kalinin, tho chairman, called for a vote of confidence, described it as "bourgeois and rotten." He maintained that the present system of registration was already too lax, ant! amid loud applause, despite the subsequent vote, urged tho Government to prolong the life of the existing lav. with amendments to provide for the protection of children born out, ot wedlock. Another Soviet representative askeo as the debate neared its end whethei it was proper to spread the principle of free love when 95 per cent, of the peasants in the villages could neither read nor write. ; A third delegate inquired whether the project did not actually mean that Soviet Russia now openly recognised free love among its people. "FIVE WrVES" Women delegates in the closing hours of the discussion fought vigorously against the project. One peasant woman delegate said in opposing the measure that women were waging war against polygamy, for she knew already of Communists who had four or five wives, and others who had registered themselves as married as manv as 15 to 20 times. Tho final speech before the closing declaration by the Minister of Justice was made by a woman delegate from Moscow, who suggested a compromise in view of the eagerness of the representatives of the Government and tho urban Soviets to pass the new legislation. This woman proposed that there should be, compulsory .registration of all marriages in villages inhabited by peasants, but that registration in cities' and urban centres be made unnecessary. Here tho debate came to an end. Kursky, the Minister of Justice, oxercising the prerogative' of his office, reiterated the Governments views on the project, und Kalinin then called for a show of hands, and every hand went up save one. Mow there will be no such misdemeanors in Russia as moral turpitude, and no illegitimacy unless cohabitation is, to quoto from the new ct.de, "accidental or merely temporary.