Double-Grosser & Cattle

J. Stalin gets results. Last year he decreed the shutting up tight of previously flourishing Soviet abortion clinics. Last week vital statistics for the first three months of 1937 were ready, showed that for that period the birth rate in Moscow nearly doubled, shot up from 18,246 to 32,632 births. J. Stalin also tightened up the notoriously loose Soviet marriage laws in 1935, and new statistics show that Moscow divorce has declined 61%.

J. Stalin fortnight ago got after the long-time chief of his Secret Police, dread Genrikh Yagoda (TIME, April 12). Whether or not Yagoda was squealing confessions under pressure of Ogpu third degree last week, the State in its newsorgans suddenly foamed with rage about Yagoda, using "Russian words rarely encountered outside the Government decrees of the time of Peter the Great, causing general wonderment as to the nature of the crime," according to able Herald Tribune Moscow Correspondent Joseph Barnes.

It was presently rumored in countries adjoining the Soviet Union last week that Dictator Stalin's hated onetime creature Yagoda had been arrested only upon demand of the Red Army in the person of its popular leader Marshal Klimentiy ("Klim") Voroshilov and Marshals Blucher, Yegorov, Tuckachevsky, and Budenny. Up to now the Ogpu has had its own troops, numbering some 240,000, and individually much better equipped than Red Army troops. As the Dictator's elite guards, these have rushed about Russia, here mercilessly mowing down a peasant revolt, there breaking a strike, next subduing a mutinous Red Army unit. Without need to take as gospel truth even the more authoritative Moscow rumors on this subject this week, it was possible to scan them as significant reminders of some of the sorest points festering these many years in the Soviet Union.

J. Stalin gets results, and soon Moscow presses were saying that Yagoda never was his creature, that the Dictator never really liked him, long wanted to be rid of him. More and more lurid stories followed, with Comrade Yagoda swelling in horrid infamy until it appeared that Ogpu evenings under him resembled Roman Saturnalia. The picture of debauchery was made to look a trifle brighter by suggesting that the Ogpu Chief's most depraved carousing and seductions came toward the close of his public career when he realized that jail was but a few jumps ahead. Item: the State press accused Yagoda of "misappropriating 1,000,000 rubles of Government funds to finance protracted debauchery."

This suggested to most Moscowites that Yagoda may not have his confession-spouting day in court as a "Trotskyist," may simply be shot by the Ogpu. The Old Bolshevik who knows most about Soviet law is Eugene Bronislavovich Pashukanis, Vice-Commissar of Justice, Director of the Institute of Soviet Construction & Law, editor of The Soviet State, law journal, and author of the Soviet Union's chief standard works on jurisprudence used in its law schools. Suddenly last week all law books by Pashukanis had to be confiscated, Soviet law students and their professors were left stranded. Reason: Old Bolshevik Pashukanis had suddenly been attacked in the official newsorgan Pravda ("Truth") by Stalin's favorite prosecutor of Old Bolsheviks, tigerish Andrei I. Vishinsky. Without waiting to get the Soviet Union's No. 1 jurist so much as arrested, Stalin's Vishinsky raged in print that the Law's Pashukanis is "a double-crosser who has turned the Soviet Law Institute into a cattle-shed!"

Such goings on as these about Yagoda and Pashukanis last week did more than any rumors or inside stories could have done to disclose in the Stalin Dictatorship shakiness, uncertainty and jitters. Excitable Vishinsky's reasons were not hard to seek. In 1917 the Russian Revolution was against juridical and police tyranny by the Imperial Government.

Therefore Soviet law was conceived in the most liberal terms, with abortions for the asking, divorces obtainable by postcard, and other features much admired by Communists, Socialists and not a few Christians throughout the world.

Loyal to that kind of Red Law, Old Bolshevik Pashukanis, whose textbooks were suppressed last week, wrote with rapturous idealism that "in the full flower of Soviet progress the law will wither away. . . . Among comrades it will gradually become unnecessary. . . . Jurisprudence as the rest of the world knows it is a characteristic bourgeois creation not needed under conditions of true Communism."

This may be a beautiful concept of Soviet law but it has been found not to work by J. Stalin. He and his tigerish prosecutors want no Soviet judges trained up that way, and the Dictator is on his way to get results, even if he has to break every Old Bolshevik in the country to do it.

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