Other significant changes of the last two years were an in creasing emphasis on the necessity of unequal wages and salaries for work of unequal quality and responsibility; a new note of Soviet nationalism, which pushed into the background the origi nally strong insistence on the international character of the Bol shevik Revolution and a new tendency to insist on the social de sirability of stable family relationships. The main feature of the Soviet marriage law, the granting of divorce at the desire of either partner in a marriage, has not been changed. But the practice of obtaining a divorce without the knowledge of the other partner has been legally forbidden ; more strenuous efforts are being made to collect payments for the support of children by previous marriages ; and the press and other agencies of propa ganda are urging young people to exercise more care and judg ment before becoming married and are recommending large families.
Education and Cultural Life.—Compulsory elementary edu cation was decreed in the Soviet Union in 1930 and has been gen erally brought into operation, with a few possible exceptions in mountainous and backward regions. The demand for trained spe cialists in industry and agriculture has led to a considerable in crease in the number of high school and university students. Teaching methods were greatly changed after 1931. Experimenta tion and lax discipline, which were very characteristic of the Soviet schools before 1931, are now frowned on; the authority of the teacher has been re-established; marks, examinations and other means for testing the exact knowledge of the student have been restored. The main distinctive features of the Soviet school at the present time are the intensive political and economic train ing along Communist lines and the anti-religious instruction.
Soviet censorship tended to become more severe during the dif ficult first years of industrialization; new novels and plays were expected to point a direct propagandist moral. More recently there has been a relaxation in this field. A preliminary censor ship is still enforced for everything published in the Soviet Union.
The work of such scientists as Pavlov in conditional reflexes, Joffe in physics, Vavilov in applied botany, Gubman and Fersman in geology has attracted international recognition. A number of excellent research institutes have been established throughout the country and there has been a good deal of exploration, espe cially in the little known regions of Central Asia and in Russia's vast Arctic territory, where Soviet seamen and aviators have given repeated demonstrations of skill and hardihood. One of the darker sides of the first Five Year Plan was the arrest and banishment of large numbers of engineers, agricultural experts and other men of learning, in most cases without any open trial, on charges of sabotage. Forty-eight specialists employed in the food industry were shot without open trial on charges of sabotage in October, 1930; and the same fate befell thirty-five in the Com missariat of Agriculture in the spring of 1933.
Stalin as Party Leader.—The emergence of Joseph Stalin to a position of absolute and unquestioned primacy in the Com munist Party was a feature of the period under consideration. Stalin's chief associates in the earlier struggle against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were Rykov, Tomsky and Bukharin were themselves brushed aside and relegated to political obscurity when they protested against the speed of industrialization and against some of the methods which were employed in promoting collectivization. No word of serious opposition to Stalin has been uttered in Party Congresses for years. One of his chief lieutenants, Kirov, was assassinated by an opposition Communist named Nikolaev late in 1934. The sequel to this assassination was the execution of 117 persons, following the verdicts of military courts sitting behind closed doors, and wholesale arrests among Com munists who had formerly been adherents of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years, Kamenev to five years of imprisonment.