PROLETARIAN JUSTICE

which the judges are elected by the workers. The only important matter is that the decisions of these courts shall bear witness to the complete breach with the customs and the ideology of the bourgeois system; that the people’s judges shall decide the cases which come before them in accordance with the dictates of proletarian ideology, and not in accordance with those of bourgeois ideology. Dealing with the unending series of disputes which arise during the break-up of the old relationships, and during the realisation of the rights of the proletariat, the people’s judges can carry to its proper issue the transformation which began with the November revolution of the year 1917, and which must inevitably involve all the mutual relationships of the citizens of the Soviet Republic. On the other hand, in dealing with the vast number of cases which occur independently of the peculiar conditions of the revolutionary era — minor criminal cases of a petty-bourgeois character — the popular courts must give expression to the entirely new attitude towards such offences which has been adopted by