107 years ago today, on May 1, 1918 (March 21, 1918 lunar calendar), the world was shocked by the forgery of the "co-wife decree". In 1918, a small Soviet cloth shop owner forged a "co-wife decree" and put it into practice. After the adventurer's death, the "co-wife decree" did not end with the court trial, but became the source of rumors of "communist co-wife". In reports from some Western countries, the Soviet "co-wife" was said to have lasted for many years. The views of Soviet historians on this sensitive and bizarre event are not unified. Some Soviet historians either kept it quiet or just passed it on. It was not until the late 1980s that the central media of the Soviet Union, such as "Spark" and "Arguments and Facts", successively revealed the fact that in 1918, in many local newspapers, a fake "decree of co-wives" appeared. The lascivious people who ate free food used this decree as a talisman and kept it in practice until 1930. The Adventurer's Whimsy At the end of June 1918, at the Exchange Building on Miasnitsky Street in Moscow, the ongoing court trial was coming to an end. The defendant in the trial was named Khvatov, who was originally a small owner of a cloth shop. Khvatov was accused of having compiled the "Public Ownership of Girls and Women in Russia", which was posted on the streets of Moscow without authorization, and organized an illegal group of anarchists. The fake "decree" consists of 19 paragraphs, which call on the toiling masses to fight for the right to sexual enjoyment. The "decree" begins with the following words: "All beautiful women have become caged birds of the bourgeoisie, seriously disturbing the normal continuation of human beings on earth." The decree, which is difficult to distinguish between true and false, is provocative: From May 1, 1918, all women between the ages of 17 and 32 shall be freed from the shackles of personal control and declare themselves the public property of the people. According to this "decree", men will have the right to "enjoy" a woman, but not more than three times a week, each time for no more than three hours. In order to obtain the right to use this "public property", the person concerned must first join a "working family" and receive a certificate of membership from the factory committee, trade union or local Soviet. For men who originally had a family, the "decree" also gives certain benefits, allowing the original husband to be close to the original wife for a specified number of times. For those who refuse to confiscate their wives, they are deprived of the right to have intimate relations with other women. The "decree" also stipulates that every member of a "working family" who desires to enjoy "a share of the people's property" must deduct 10% of his income. Men who do not belong to a "working family" are required to pay a monthly membership fee of 100 rubles. The administration will use these salary deductions and contributions to establish a "People's Descendants" fund, which will pay 232 rubles in compensation to publicly owned women, provide subsidies to pregnant women, and support their children, so that the children will grow up to 17 years old in the "cradle of the people", and women who are incapable of working will also receive pensions. During the judicial investigation of the absurd practice court, it was found that before his arrest, Khvatov had already implemented part of the "decree". To this end, he bought a three-room wooden house in the village of Sokolniki and named it the "House of Love of Members". He also found some "residents" for the "palace" and referred to the patrons collectively as "members of the family commune". After receiving the membership fees from the "members", Khvatov kept the money for himself. Sometimes he would visit the "Love Palace" in person to find the young woman he liked, of course, completely free. According to Khvatov's arrangement, every 10 members slept in one room, and the male and female members rested separately. In two of the ten-bed rooms, a trumpet (cubicle) was separated for two people to sleep in. With the consent of the other members, a man and a woman could live in the cubicle and enjoy sex to the fullest. After these details of the lives of the "commune members" were spread, a group of young people and their girlfriends asked to join the "commune" one after another. This time, the "Love Palace" was in a mess, and the married women, who were obviously in the minority, quit their jobs. They began to protest and beat the floor desperately with the slats they brought. "acquittal" was really an unheard-of case in the history of law, and it was highly regarded by the Soviet law enforcement agencies. In order to hear this incident clearly, the Soviet Party and government organs sent backbones to intervene in the court trial and debate. The chairman of the court was Mokira, a veteran front-line soldier with strong swordsmanship. The assistants to the judges were all people's jurors, while the defenders were Kolontai, the People's Commissar for State Relief, and the other was Larin, a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. On the side of the prosecution, the government sent two representatives: one was Vino Gratskaya, director of the women's department of the Moscow Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), and the other was Zalkind, a famous "Bolshevik doctor" in Moscow. In their speeches, they repeatedly stressed that "the working class has the right to interfere in the sexual life of its members in order to safeguard the interests of the revolution." At the end of their speeches, the two accusers proposed that Khvatov be held criminally responsible: deprivation of liberty for five years, imprisonment in Vladimir Central Prison, and confiscation of all personal property. When Mokira asked the defense to speak, the female defender Kolontai leaped lightly onto the podium. In her 40-minute speech, she defended her theory of "Eros" in brilliant language. In her defense, she argued that the casual nature of relations between men and women and the lack of formal constraints led to frivolous behavior, which allowed the things promoted in Khvatov's "decree" to be marketed. Kolontai emphasized that the freedom and laxity inherent in Russian society at the bottom before the October Revolution, and the decline of ethics in society as a whole, will not automatically disappear with the development of socialism, but will also leave more or less traces, and the bad habits of the bourgeoisie will continue to rise from time to time. Given this social background, Kolontai asked the court to extrajudicial clemency and acquit Khvatov directly from the court, but that the money received from the lecherous "commune members" should be confiscated and turned over to the state treasury. At the end of the speech, as soon as Kolontai jumped off the podium, the guard line of heavily armed Red Army soldiers was broken by Khvatov's supporters. A group of married women broke into the courtroom in a mighty manner, shouting together: "Tyrant! Blasphemy! Condemned!" After a while, they began to throw rotten eggs, rotten potatoes and dead cats. Not only were the judges, prosecutors and defenders smashed, but also the object of their solidarity - the defendant Khvatov. Seeing that the situation in the courtroom was completely out of control, the guards immediately called for reinforcements. An armored vehicle quickly rushed to the scene of the accident, and a group of armed sailors jumped from it. Seeing that the general situation was not good, the women were frightened and scattered. After the situation in the courthouse settled down, Mokira, a one-armed veteran soldier, and two soldiers' jurors went into another conference room to discuss the court's final ruling. After about three hours of deliberation, Inkolontai was in a position of power, and they finally accepted her opinion. The court decided on the spot as follows: Inkhvatov had insufficient evidence of his crime, and the court released him in court. At the same time, the court ordered the defendant, the "Love Palace" in the village of Sokolniki, to be handed over immediately to the public, and the illegally obtained money must be turned over to the state treasury. Although Khvatov secretly rejoiced in his release, his peace did not last long. The day after his release, he was killed by a group of anarchists in his cloth shop. After the killing, they also posted notices everywhere, calling the murder an "act of revenge and a just protest" because the deceased had misappropriated the name of the anarchists and published a pornographic "Law on the Public Ownership of Russian Girls and Women", which seriously tarnished the reputation of the anarchist organization. The story of the forgery of the decree is not over, but quite the opposite. Once the absurd decree was released, it spread and spread widely across Russia with lightning speed. By the autumn of 1918, it was widely reprinted in many bourgeois and petty-bourgeois newspapers. Some saw it as a bizarre gimmick that caught the attention of readers, while others were designed to discredit the anarchist movement and thus the Soviet regime. It should be remembered that the anarchists established a united front with the Bolsheviks and participated in the work of the Soviets at all levels. False decrees proliferated, but the new regime did not control the momentum in time. False decrees were also spread falsely, and various new versions kept appearing. For example, in the Vyatka border region (Kirov Oblast), the right-wing Socialist-Revolutionist Vinogradov excerpted Khvatov's "masterpiece" from Ufa al-Hayat, revised it with embellishment, and re-published it in the Vyatka border newspaper under the title "Immortal Document". During the Russian Civil Revolutionary War, the White Guards were also accustomed to using forged decrees as weapons. In order to agitate the masses against the Soviet regime, the White Guards also issued a large number of fake decrees in the name of the Bolsheviks. When Kolchak, the leader of the White Guards, was arrested in January 1920, the fake decree of Khvatov was also found in the pocket of his uniform. The dissemination and demise of Khvatov's "masterpieces" and some of his practices were not only well known in the Soviet Union, but also "famous abroad." In the summer of 1918, headlines appeared in major American and European newspapers: "Forbidden to form families, Bolshevik co-wives," "Soviets practice group marriage," "Socialism legalizes prostitution," "Bolsheviks make Russian civilization desolate," and so on. When these articles appeared in the press, many Westerners had a strong negative impression of the Soviet Union, believing that the Bolsheviks had destroyed marriage and the family and socialized women. Herbert Wells, a famous British writer, also heard about this miracle. In 1920, he made a special trip from London to Moscow and talked to Lenin for three hours, trying to find out whether the leadership of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) had actually issued the "Public Ownership of Girls and Women in Russia" and whether it was ready to be implemented in daily life. Lenin explained that the central organs of Soviet power had nothing to do with the "decree". Wells wrote about this in his book "Russia in the Shadow". During the period 1920-1930, Soviet society began to turn towards asceticism, and the norms of social life were very serious. Beginning in the mid-1930s, romantic relations between men and women were once again highly politicized. In the title pages of newspapers and magazines, there were no more articles on sexual issues. In the streets of the city, girls in frivolous clothes also disappeared without a trace. In March 1935, an incident in a Soviet textile factory became the best footnote of this period: Lenin's Komsomolskaya fired a young fitter for "loving two girls at the same time." The Soviet government gave great encouragement and promotion to the socialist life of indifference. In 1937, Komsomolskaya Pravda published an editorial saying: "The enemies of the people have tried their best to influence the young people's views on marriage and love with bourgeois ideas, so as to corrupt the Soviet youth politically." At this stage, premarital sex was thoroughly relegated to the "toxic capitalist way of life". Even formal divorce was labelled ugly, which further affected the future careers and fortunes of Communist Youth League members or Communist Party members. With a series of major events in the Soviet Union in the last century, the smoke cloud of the "Co-wife Order" incident was blown away and gradually disappeared from people's vision and discussion.