The following article, which we translate from “Soviet Russia”, of New York, the official organ of the Bureau of the Soviet Government, is the text of an interesting speech given by Comrade Kollontai at the Third Congress of the Women's Section of the Russian Communist Party, on the serious problem of prostitution, as it presents itself today in the Soviet Republic.
 

The problem of prostitution is a delicate and difficult one, to which in the past, in Soviet Workers’ Russia, insufficient attention was paid. And now this sad legacy of the past capitalist bourgeoisie continues to vitiate the atmosphere of the Workers’ Republic and, what is worse, to affect the physical and moral health of the working population of Soviet Russia.

It is true that under the influence of the changing economic and social conditions during these three years of revolution, prostitution has partly changed its primitive form and character. But we are still far from having overcome this danger. It continues to weigh upon us, causing great harm to the feeling of solidarity and comradeship among the members of the Proletarian Republic – working men and women – a feeling that constitutes the basis, the foundation of the new communist society that we want to create, consolidate and make a reality. It is time that we devoted some attention to this question, it is time to seriously study the causes, it is time to find the way and the means for a complete eradication of this danger, which must not exist in the Workers’ Republic.

In our Republic, this has been a deficiency not only of the laws aimed at the suppression of prostitution, but also of the clear expression of our attitude towards it, as a most harmful danger to the general good.

We know that prostitution is a danger, we also understand that now, in this extremely difficult period of transition, prostitution is assuming intolerable proportions: but in the past we simply set it aside, we said nothing about this phenomenon partly because of a remnant of hypocrisy that is still within us as a legacy of the bourgeois conception of life, and partly because of our inability to truly understand and realize the damage that a widely developed prostitution causes to working society. To this we must ascribe the negligence that has so far been manifested in our legislation on this question.

In the past, our body of laws have been deficient in that branch of legislation concerning prostitution as a harmful social phenomenon. When the old Tsarist laws were abolished by the Council of People's Commissars, all legislation on prostitution was abolished with them. But in place of the abolished laws no new ones were introduced in the interest of the society of workers. This is the cause of the illogical variety of our measures, of the contradictions that characterize the police action of the Soviet Power in different places regarding prostitution and the prostitutes themselves. In some places, regular searches of prostitutes have been carried out, searches conducted “with the old methods”, with the help of the militia. In others, brothels exist openly (the real data on this subject existing in the Interdepartmental Commission to Combat Prostitution is useful). In other places still, prostitutes were subjected to the same statutes as criminals and were interned in forced labor camps. All this shows that the absence of clearly formulated legislation creates a very confused relationship between local authorities and this complicated social phenomenon, which produces a quantity of various harmful deviations from our legislative and moral principles. It is therefore necessary not only to address the issue of prostitution directly, but also to seek a solution that must be in harmony with our fundamental principles and with the postulates of the social and economic program of the Communist Party.

First of all it is necessary to define precisely what prostitution is. Prostitution is a phenomenon closely linked to income not earned through labour and therefore flourishes in the era of capitalism and private property. From our point of view, prostitutes are all those women who sell their caresses and their bodies, temporarily or for an extended period of time, for the benefit of men, for material compensaton, for beautiful shoes, clothes, ornaments, etc., for the right obtained by selling themselves to men and not by performing and subjecting themselves to any kind of labor.

Prostitution in our Soviet Republic is a sad legacy of the past capitalist bourgeoisie, in which only an insignificant number of women were engaged in labor that was productive for the national economy, while a huge number, more than half of the entire female population, lived off the labor of their husbands or brothers.

Prostitution in ancient times

Prostitution appeared under the earliest forms of government, as an inevitable consequence of the established system of formal marriage, which guaranteed the right to private property and ensured the transfer of possession of goods to legal heirs.

In this way it was possible to save accumulated, or freely stolen, wealth from the division that would inevitably have resulted from the large number of heirs in the subsequent generations. But between prostitution as it was in the time of the Greeks and Romans and the prostitution of our days, there is a big difference. Prostitution in ancient times was, first of all, numerically very insignificant, and secondly, it did not have that character of hypocrisy that allows today's society to adorn itself with the morality of the capitalist world and induces bourgeois society to bow respectfully before the legal wife of the capitalist magnate who openly sells herself to a husband she does not love, and to turn its head in disgust from girls thrown on the street by poverty, lack of care, unemployment and other social causes stemming from the nature of capitalism and private property. Prostitution in antiquity was considered a legal complement to regularly established family relationships.

In the Middle Ages, under the guild system, prostitution was recognized as a legal and natural phenomenon of life; prostitutes had their own guild that participated in the same way as other guilds in festive events and municipal celebrations.

Prostitution guarantees the sister castes of respectable citizens and ensures the fidelity of legally obtained wives, since bachelors always have the opportunity, for a fee, to enjoy carnal pleasures with professional prostitutes. Therefore prostitution was useful to the honorable property-owning citizens, and they openly acknowledged this.

With the rise of capitalism the picture begins to change.

For the first time in history, prostitution, due to its proportions and its nature, begins to constitute a danger to society in the 19th and 20th centuries; the sale of a woman's labor power, which increased uninterruptedly, is closely and inextricably linked to the sale of women's bodies and determines the fact that not only abandoned girls enter the ranks of prostitutes, but also the respectable wives of workers; the mother for the love of her children; the young girl (Sonia Marmeladov) for the love of her family. This is the picture of horror and hypocrisy that arises from the exploitation of labor by capital. Wherever wages are insufficient for a woman's needs, clandestine trade appears: the sale of love.

The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society on the one hand generates prostitution with all the forces of its ruinous economic exploitation and on the other hand persecutes with its contempt the girls or women who have been driven by need onto this sorrowful path.

Prostitution is the black shadow that accompanies legal marriage in bourgeois society. In the 19th and 20th centuries prostitution assumed enormous proportions, never before reached in history. In Berlin there is one prostitute for every twenty so-called respectable women, in Paris one for every eighteen and in London one for every nine. One form of prostitution is open, regulated, legal; another form is secret, clandestine, “occasional”. But whatever form it takes, it is always a poisonous and unhealthy product of that fetid quagmire that is the bourgeois system of society.

And even young girls, the tender buds of the future, are not spared by the world bourgeois class, which throws nine and ten-year-old girls into the repugnant embraces of old, rich men, saturated with vice. So-called pleasure houses of minors are a phenomenon that has existed for a long time in the bourgeois state. Today, after the war, the unemployment which weighs more heavily on women, has caused a tremendous increase in the mass of “women of the pavement” in Europe.

Greedy multitudes of rich buyers of white slaves stroll through the streets of Berlin, Paris and other cultural centers of respectable capitalist states at night. Openly, in view of all, the market for women is conducted. And what of it? The bourgeois world is based entirely on buying and selling, and even legal marriage itself undoubtedly contains elements of material calculation, or at least economic. Prostitution, as a clandestine profession, is a way out for the woman who has not been able to find a man to support her. Prostitution in a capitalist system is a means by which men can have conjugal relations with women, without being obliged to support them for a long period, until death do them part.

But if prostitution is so widespread, if it persists even in Soviet Russia, how is it to be fought against? To answer this question, it is first necessary to remember what the causes of prostitution are, and what is the source from which it arises.

Bourgeois science and its representatives regard prostitution as a “pathological” phenomenon that derives from the abnormal qualities of certain women. Just as there are criminals who present congenital characteristics from birth, so, it has been said, there are born prostitutes; wherever they are, whatever the conditions in which they find themselves, they will end up in vice. Naturally, this erroneous conception of the bourgeois schoolboy does not stand up to comparison with the facts of life.

Marx and the most honest of bourgeois schoolboys, statistical physicists, clearly state that the innate inclinations of women have nothing to do with it. Prostitution is first and foremost a social phenomenon, closely connected to the defenseless position of women and their economic dependence in the family and in marriage.

The roots of prostitution lie in the soil of the economic system.

The economic condition on the one hand, and the habit, developed in women by centuries of education, of seeking material support in men through legal or extra-marital relationships on the other, are the roots, the causes of prostitution.

In reality, if the bourgeois scholars of the school of Lombroso and Tarnovsky, who claim that prostitutes are born with a tendency towards perversion and sexual abnormality, are right in stating this, how do they explain the well-known fact that in times of crisis and unemployment the number of prostitutes suddenly increases? How do they explain that the buyers of white slaves, who in Tsarist Russia came from other countries, always found a rich harvest in the poorest provinces that suffered from poor harvests, while in the more prosperous provinces they returned empty-handed or with a small number of white slaves? Why do such a large number of perverse women appear all of a sudden, driven to ruin by nature, precisely in years of misery and unemployment?

And moreover, is it not characteristic that in capitalist countries prostitution recruits its victims mostly from among the poorest strata of the population?

The highest percentage of prostitutes is always found among the working women employed in the lowest paid trades, among the most neglected and lonely young women, forced by need and by the necessity of providing for the most urgent needs of their little brothers and sisters, who weigh upon the shoulders of young and miserable girls without protection. If the theory of the bourgeois scholars about the innate criminality and congenital perversity of certain women were correct as a cause of prostitution, all classes of the population, including the rich and privileged classes, would produce a percentage of criminals and perverse women as high as the needy classes; but in reality this is not so. Professional prostitutes, who live by the sale of their bodies, are recruited only rarely from the propertied class. They are driven into prostitution by poverty, hunger, neglect or the glaring phenomenon of social inequality, which is the basis of the bourgeois system.

Let us take another example. The increase in professional prostitution, as the statistics show, is composed, in all capitalist countries, of girls between the age of thirteen and twenty three, in other words, the age of childhood and youth. And even among them, the majority are those who have been neglected or abandoned. It is characteristic that girls from privileged families, who are cared for by their relatives, only in exceptional cases enter the ranks of prostitution. In most cases, the latter are the victims of a number of tragic circumstances, among which the most important role is played by deceitful and hypocritical bourgeois morality. The girl who has sinned is cast out by her family and finding herself alone, without help, persecuted by the scorn of society, she is placed in a situation for which there is only one way out: prostitution.

Poorly paid work, the glaring inequality of capitalist society, the unhealthy habit of women to be economically dependent on men, to seek support not in their own labor but in the reward of love, in a man who supports them, this is what generates prostitution, it is here that we must search for the roots of this unhealthy phenomenon that has existed for a long time.

The proletarian revolution in Russia, which demolished the foundations of capitalism, also abolished the dependence of women on men that had existed in the past.

All citizens are equal before the workers' society, only they are obliged to work for the common good and, in case of need, the community provides for them.

Women are no longer protected by marriage, but by their participation in the creation of national wealth, in other words, by their productive work. The reciprocal relations between the sexes are transported to a new basis. But the old views and conceptions still weigh on us. Furthermore, our economic system is still far from being entirely established according to the new directives. We are still far from the communist way of life. Naturally, in this transitional period, prostitution still has a powerful base. Many of the causes that determine it will not be removed in any way, until the fundamental causes from which it originates – private property and the rigid form of the bourgeois family – have been eliminated. But numerous factors remain: the neglect and deficiency of child protection, the poor living conditions of the working class, the abandonment of youth, the low pay of women’s labor, the imperfection of our supply apparatus, the general disorganization of the national economy, and a host of other economic and social phenomena that still give rise to the sale of women, thus fuelling prostitution.

The fight against prostitution requires first of all the fight against all the phenomena mentioned above, in other words, it requires support for the general policy of Soviet Power in the work of strengthening the beginnings of Communism and perfecting production.

This is our main and fundamental task. Some will ask: “Is it necessary in this case to wage a special war against prostitution? This painful phenomenon will disappear by itself, when we have strengthened the power of the proletariat, in the midst of the beginning of Communism”.

To discuss this is to ignore the disruptive and destructive influence that prostitution has on the entire structure of communist society. Already at the first Russian Congress of Working and Peasant Women the correct program was established: “Free and equal citizens of the proletarian Soviet Republic cannot and must not be bought and sold”. This is what had to be said, but in reality the conditions remain as they were before.

Prostitution harms worker’s Russia, primarily from the point of view of the national economy and the free development of our productive forces. We know that victory over disorganization, the increase in the evolution of our industry is only possible with the extreme utilization of all the working energies of the Republic, with a complete and methodical application of all the individual working forces, of both women and men.

Down with the unproductive work of domestic life, the exploitation of girls in the home! Forward with organized labor, productive labor, labor that is useful to the workers. Organization! This is the problem of the moment.

Meanwhile, what is a professional prostitute?

A professional prostitute is a person whose working energy is not used for the benefit of the collective well-being, a person who lives at the expense of others and receives a share of the rations of others.

Is such a state of affairs permitted in a Workers’ Republic? Certainly not, because it reduces the supply of labor power, the number of arms that work for the creation of national wealth, of social goods.

How should the professional prostitute be considered from the point of view of the interests of the national economy? As a person who deserts labour. In this sense we must condemn prostitution without mercy.

In the interest of a rational economic plan, we must immediately begin the struggle against this danger, we must bring about a reduction in the number of prostitutes and strike at their manifestations, whatever form they may take.

It is time for us to understand how the existence of prostitution is in contradiction with the fundamental principles of the Proletarian Republic, in which every form of gain not obtained through work is subject to persecution

We are creating a morality of our own, based on principles different from those of past morality. For example, three years ago we saw a merchant as a fully respectable person. If his commercial books were in order, if he did not go bankrupt fraudulently, if he did not openly and shamelessly defraud his customers, not only was he not thrown into prison, but he was referred to with honorable designations, such as: “merchant of first quality”, “from an old family of merchants”, “a respectable citizen”, etc.

Now, in the time of revolution, our relationship with commerce and with merchants has radically changed. We now call the “honorable merchant” a “speculator”. We no longer address him with flattering epithets, but we take him before the Extraordinary Commission and send him to a labor camp. And why is this? Simply because we know that we will only be able to create the new communist economy inducing all citizens to undertake productive labor. Anyone who doesn't work, anyone who lives at the expense of others, on the earnings of others and doesn't do productive labor, that person is a danger to the collective society, to the republic. That is why we persecute the speculators, the traders, the profiteers, in short, all those who live on income not obtained through labour, that is why we must fight prostitution as one of the forms of desertion from labor.

But when we consider prostitutes and combat them as non-productive elements of society, we must not place them in a special category. For us, for the Workers’ Republic, it is absolutely indifferent whether a woman sells herself to one or more men, whether she is a professional prostitute who lives off revenue other than that of her own useful labor, or whether she sells her caresses to a legal husband or to an occasional buyer of female pleasures, whose identity may vary from day to day. All women who desert labor, who do not take part in productive labor, who do not do any work for their children, are placed on the same level as prostitutes, they must be forced to work. We cannot make any distinction between the prostitute and the legal wife who lives at her husband's expense, whoever he may be, even if he is a “commisar”.

In other words, we are about to introduce equal treatment among all labor deserters. From the point of view of the working community, the woman is condemned not because she sells her body, but because, just like the legally married idle woman, she gives no useful labor for the community. This new procedure, absolutely new, with regard to prostitution is dictated by the interest of the working collectivity.

The second reason why we must immediately conduct a systematic campaign against prostitution is to defend public health.

Soviet Russia is interested in preventing the disorganization and waste of the population's workforce, as well as its working capacity, from disease and indisposition. Now, prostitution is one of the sources of venereal disease, but it is of course not the only one. These diseases can also be transmitted in the regular course of daily life, due to poor family conditions. The absence of hygienic measures, a shortage of dishes and towels which are therefore used in common by several people, often lead to infections. Furthermore, in our extremely unsettled period, due to the continual gatherings and frequent transfers of the army from one place to another, venereal diseases have spread widely independently of the agencies of commercial prostitution.

For example, in the fertile southern provinces the civil war was particularly intense. The male Cossack population was dispersed, they left with the whites or scattered in all directions. Only the women remained in the area. They had enough of everything because there were no men. The Red Army advances and takes the city, they are given accommodation, they remain in the area for several weeks. As a result, mutual attractions arise, free unions, which have nothing to do with prostitution, since in this case the woman voluntarily joins the man out of inclination and without any calculation of material gain; it is not the men of the Red Army who support the women, but on the contrary, it is they who take care of them, mend their clothes, they take care of them while the army is stationed in that place. But when the army leaves, that focality remains infected with venereal diseases. The same thing happened in the cities and villages that were taken over by the whites. A general contagion developed. Diseases have spread and threaten to destroy the entire generation not yet born. At the joint session of the Society for the Protection of Motherhood and the Provincial Women's Section, Prof. Koltsov spoke about hygiene, the science of healing and perfecting the human race.

Closely linked to this task is the question of the struggle against prostitution, which is one of the most active causes of infection from one person to another.

In the theses of the Interdepartmental Commission for the Struggle against Prostitution, it is stated in the Commission for Social Welfare that the immediate task of the Commissariat for Public Health is to develop special measures for the fight against venereal infections.

Naturally these measures cover all causes of infection and must not be limited to persecuting prostitution, as hypocritical bourgeois society did. But nevertheless, since we recognize that the spread of infection takes place on a vast scale in the regular course of daily life, it is very important to give the population a clear notion of the function of prostitution in the spread of venereal diseases.

It is extremely important to carry out a proper sex education among the youth, to provide young people with accurate information, to enable them to enter life with open eyes, to shun silence on questions relating to sex life, as the deceitful and hypocritical bourgeois morality did.

The third reason why prostitution is inadmissible in the proletarian Soviet Republic is that it prevents the development and consolidation of the fundamental class qualities of the proletariat, of its new morality. What are the fundamental properties of the working class, the most powerful moral weapon in its struggle? The feeling of comradeship, of solidarity. Solidarity is the foundation of Communism. Without this feeling, which is strongly rooted among the workers, it is inconceivable how we will be able to build a new, truly communist society. Of course, it is evident that conscious communists must help the development of this feeling with all their strength, and vice versa, they must fight with all their energy against those forces that impede the development and consolidation of these qualities and characteristics of the working class.

What are the consequences of prostitution? A decrease in the feeling of equality, solidarity and comradeship between the sexes, in other words, between the two halves of the working class. The man who buys the caresses of the woman sees in her a convenience. He considers the woman as his dependent, that is, as a creature of a lower order, not having equal rights and not being of equal value in the eyes of the workers' government. His contemptuous attitude towards the prostitutes, whose attention he materially buys, extends to all women. Instead of a growth of comradeship, equality and solidarity, if prostitution develops further we shall have a strengthening of the conditions of inequality between the sexes, of the feeling of superiority of the man, of the dependence of woman on him- in other words, a lessening of solidarity in the whole working class.

From the point of view of the new communist morality that is in the process of formation and crystallization, prostitution is intolerable and dangerous. Therefore the task of our party, and of the women's section in particular, must be to wage an open, resolute and merciless campaign against this legacy of the past. In bourgeois society, all systems for combating prostitution were a useless waste of energy, since the two fundamental causes of prostitution - the existence of private property and the direct economic dependence of a large number of women on men (father, husband, lover) - were powerfully and firmly established.

In the Proletarian Republic these causes have been eliminated. Private property has been abolished. All citizens of the Soviet Republic are obliged to work. Marriage ceases to be a means for a woman to earn a living and thus escape the inevitability of working, of feeding themselves with their own labor. The fundamental objective causes of prostitution in Soviet Russia have been abolished. There remain a number of secondary economic and social causes, which are easier to eliminate. The Women's Section must decisively direct its energies in this direction, where it will find a vast field of activity open before it. It is necessary to put in mind that the fight against prostitution can only be conducted on the basis of a fight against the causes from which it originates, and consequently the study of these causes and their accurate research is the first task of the Women's Section.

Since last year, under the guidance of the Central Organ of the People's Commissariat for Public Health, an Interdepartmental Commission has been organized to combat prostitution.

For a number of reasons the work was temporarily abandoned, but in the fall of this year the commission was reconstituted and with the active cooperation of Dr. Golman and the Central Organ, it has already begun to work according to a carefully elaborated plan. The Interdepartmental Commission includes representatives from the People's Commissariat for Justice, Public Health, Labor, Social Welfare, and Education; from the Women's Sections and the Young Communist League.

The Commission formulated a series of theses (printed in its Bulletin No. 4), sent a circular to all the provincial sections of the People's Commissariat for Public Health, set up similar commissions in the provinces, which work under the direction of the Central Commission, and established a number of measures to conduct a systematic fight against the sources that feed prostitution.

The Interdepartmental Commission believes that the Women's Sections should show the most active and most keen interest in this matter, since prostitution is a scourge that mainly affects women and the working class. The task of the Women's Sections is to carry out general propaganda on all questions related to prostitution, since it is in our interest to develop the revolution in the field of the family, to establish relations between the sexes, to address this problem from the point of view of the interest of the working society. We will only get rid of prostitution once and for all if we consolidate the beginnings of Communism. This irrefutable truth is the axiom on which our work is based. But this fundamental task must be integrated with another: the declaration of the rules of the new communist morality.

Communists must openly acknowledge that a great and incomparable revolution is taking place in the field of relations between the sexes. But this revolution has been made possible thanks to the upheaval that has taken place in the economic system and in the functions that women perform in the economic activity of the proletarian state. Currently, in this difficult period of transition, while the old is being demolished and the new is only partially constructed, conjugal relations between the sexes very often take on unhealthy and unacceptable forms for the interests of the collectivity. But in all this manifold variety of conjugal systems established during this transitional period, there is nevertheless something good.

Not only is it necessary to fight with practical means against the causes that come to us from the past and that still nourish prostitution, to support any progress in the field of the housing problem and fight against the lack of housing, against neglect in the treatment of children, but it is also necessary to determine the resolute participation of the workers and the crystallization of the morality of the working class still in the process of ascension and formation, since only now is the proletariat consolidating its dictatorship.

The Interdepartmental Commission informs us that in Soviet Russia prostitution appears in two forms: that of professional prostitution and that of secret gain. The first form is very little developed among us and its extension is very limited. In Petrograd, for example, where expeditions were undertaken against prostitutes, this way of combating prostitution did not yield practical results.

The second form, highly developed and widespread in bourgeois capitalist countries, takes on a wide variety of forms among us. (In Petrograd, before the revolution, there were between 6,000 and 7,000 registered prostitutes, while in reality more than 50,000 women actually practiced prostitution). Prostitution is practiced by the employees of the Soviet offices in order to obtain luxury boots with the sale of their caresses. We find prostitution among mothers of families, workers and peasants who, not having flour for their children, sell their bodies to the person in charge of ration distribution, in order to obtain a bag of the precious food from him. Sometimes the girls employed in offices give themselves to their superiors not for purely material gain, such as rations, shoes, etc., but in the hope of advancement. This is an additional form of prostitution, “career prostitution”, which in the final analysis is also based on material calculation.

How should we combat these conditions? The problem of penal sanctions for prostitution was proposed to the Interdepartmental Commission. Many representatives were in favor of the system of subjecting prostitutes to legal persecution, due to the fact that they in reality desert labor. The recognition of a culpability in prostitutes logically leads to the admission of the legality of their persecution, their internment in concentration camps, etc.

The Central Organ declared itself clearly and resolutely against this concept. If the persecution of prostitutes is admitted, it follows that similar treatment must be meted out to legal wives who live off their husbands' means and are of no use to the State.

This was the point of view of the Central Organ, which was supported by representatives of the People's Commissariat for Justice. If we take the factor of desertion from labor as the determining element of the crime, there is no other way out: all forms of labor desertion must be equalised and subject to the same sanctions. The factor of conjugal relations, of relations between the sexes, is eliminated. In the Workers' Republic it cannot be considered a determining element of crime.

In bourgeois society, the prostitute was defamed and persecuted not because she did not provide useful and productive labor, not because she sold her kisses (two thirds of women in bourgeois society sold themselves) to their legal husband, but because of the irregularity of her marital relations due to the brevity of their duration.

The basis of marriage in bourgeois society was its stability and formality, its registration. The purpose of this registration was to ensure the transmission of property to heirs. The lack of formality, the short duration of relations between the sexes – this was what the bourgeoisie repudiated in extra-marital relations, what was defamed with contempt by the hypocritical standard-bearers of bourgeois morality. From the point of view of the working humanity, can the short duration, the irregularity, the freedom of sexual relations be considered a crime, an act that must be punished? Evidently not. Freedom of sexual relations does not contradict the ideology of Communism. The interests of the workers’ community are in no way harmed by the fact that a marriage may be of short or long duration, or that it may be based on love, passion or a transitory physical attraction.

The only thing that is harmful to the working collectivity, and therefore inadmissible, is the element of material calculation that intervenes in relations between the sexes, whether in the form of prostitution or legal marriage, the substitution of a crude materialistic calculation for the free union of the sexes on the basis of mutual attraction.

This factor is harmful, unacceptable; it destroys the feeling of equality and solidarity between the sexes. From this point of view we must condemn prostitution, as a form of commerce similar to that of legal wives, who retain their intolerable position in the Workers’ Republic.

Is this decisive element not sufficient to require legal sanction? In the Interdepartmental Commission, the guilt of prostitutes for prostitution was not admitted. All that remained to be decided was the point for which all the persons who wander the streets and desert work, must be placed at the disposal of the Commissariat for Social Welfare, and these sent either to the Labor Force Distribution Sections of the People's Commissariat for Labor, or to sanatoriums, hospitals, etc. and only after repeated desertion by the prostitutes, in other words after a clear demonstration of the intention to shirk their duties, would they be subjected to forced labor. There is no special guilt in prostitutes. They are not to be separated in any way from the other categories of labor deserters. This is a revolutionary and useful directive, worthy of the world's first Proletarian Republic.

The question of the guilt of the clients of prostitution, in other words, of men, was also raised before the Commission. There were defenders of this conception. But this desperate attempt must be rejected, as it does not follow logically from our fundamental assumptions. How should the client of prostitution be defined? A proposal to set up institutions of “Sisters and Brothers of Social Investigation” was presented to the Commission and voted in by the majority. The representative of the People's Commissariat for Justice declared that since it was not possible to define the extent of the crime precisely, the question of the clients' guilt was automatically precluded. The point of view of the Central Organ was victorious once again. There is no doubt that the miserable and inadequate remuneration for women's labor continues, in Soviet Russia, to be one of the real factors that push women into prostitution in one form or another. Legally, the wage is the same for men and women, but in reality the women hired for work are in most cases unskilled workers.

The question of creating a capable and skilled female workforce, of extending a network of special schools throughout the country, is an extremely urgent issue.

The second cause is women’s distaste for politics, the absence among them of a broad social viewpoint. The best way to combat prostitution is to awaken among the broad masses of women a political consciousness, to draw them into the revolutionary struggle and into the work of creating Communism.

Prostitution is also reinforced by the fact that the housing issue in Soviet Russia has not yet been resolved. The Interdepartmental Commission is interested in solving the problem of communal housing for working youth, and in creating an extensive network of houses for the temporary shelter of women arriving in the city. But if the Women's Sections and the Youth Relief Commission do not take active initiative and independent work, this issue will remain on paper. The Women's Sections in the provinces must also get in touch with national educators, with the aim of solving the problem of appropriate sex education in schools. What marriage will become in the future, or more specifically, what form relations between the sexes will take, is very difficult to predict. But it is certain that under a communist regime, not only will all material calculations and all forms of dependence of the woman on the man be excluded from conjugal relations, but also all other considerations of “convenience” that so often characterize marriage today. At the basis of conjugal relations is a healthy instinct for reproduction, embellished by the attractions of a happy love, of an ardent passion, suffused with a spiritual harmony that determines a spontaneous physiological attraction, which soon dies out.

All these factors of conjugal relations have nothing in common with prostitution. Prostitution is offensive because it is an act of violence by the woman on herself, determined by the pressure of external and fortuitous advantages; in prostitution there is no place for love and passion, nor for any healthy instinct of reproduction of the species. It is purely a deliberate act of material calculation. Where passion or attraction enters, prostitution disappears.

Under communism, prostitution will pass into the oblivion of the past along with the insane system of the current family. In its place will arise healthy, happy and free relationships between the sexes. A new generation will replace the old with a more developed social feeling, with greater mutual independence, with greater freedom, health and courage. A generation for whom the well-being of the community will be placed above all else.

Comrades, our task is to destroy the roots that nourish prostitution; to wage an unyielding struggle against every vestige of individualism, which has hitherto been the moral basis of marriage; to bring about an ideological revolution in the field of matrimonial relations and to clear the way for a new healthy conjugal morality that corresponds to the interests of the working community.