Page:The Marriage Laws of Soviet Russia (1921).pdf/11

 clerical control. It should be noted, of course, that the present law in no way interferes with the right of those who desire to be married by religious ceremony. (The parties may, as is the custom in France, where only civil marriages are valid, supplement the civil contract with the religious ceremony.) But the religious ceremony is shorn of its legal significance and obligation, and is replaced by a wholly new form. This is more effectively revolutionary than it would have been to have left the supremacy of the church uncontested in this field. The law, however, goes further than this. It abolishes all the old feudal impediments to marriage, such as differences in faith and other religious prohibitions which were enforced under the old regime. The reformation of the divorce law was one of the revolutionary changes left for the Russian proletariat to accomplish. The marriage law as it stands in this code no doubt awaits revision in the light of experience gained in the new order. The framers of the law would claim no more than that by freeing both men and women from the oppressive tyranny of the old bourgeois and feudal concepts of the marriage relation, they have opened the way to further progress.

As belonging to the third class of provisions contained in the code, the first beginnings of new forms, emerging into view even before the old forms have been completely destroyed, we must count the careful arrangements for the registration of vital statistics, for a scientific computation of social factors. Here we get a glimpse of a governmental function which is statistical and informative rather than magisterial and repressive. As A. G.