requisitions but the Soviet Government itself at first gave them this name, as we may see from a passage in Soviet Russia of February 28, 1920:
Beginning with November, 1918, to this old system there were added on two taxes of a purely revolutionary character which stand out apart within the partly outgrown system "taxes in kind" (decree of October 30, 1918), and "extraordinary taxes" (November 2, 1918).
Both decrees have been described as follows by Comrade Krestinsky, Commissary of the Finance, at the May session of the financial sub-divisions:
"These are decrees of a different order, the only thing they have in common is that they both bear a class character and that each provides for the tax to increase in direct proportion with the amount of property which the taxpayer possesses, that the poor are completely free from both taxes, and the lower middle class pays them in a smaller proportion.
"The extraordinary tax aims at the savings which remained in the hands of the urban and larger rural bourgeoisie, from former times. Insofar as it is directed at non-labor savings it cannot be levied more than once.
"As regards the taxes in kind, borrowing Comrade Krestinsky's expression, 'it will remain in force during the period of transition to the Communist order until the village will from practical experience realize the advantage of rural economy on a large scale compared with the small farming estate, and will of its own accord, without compulsion, en masse adopt the communist method of land cultivation.'"
Krestinsky's claim that this intended gradual transition to agricultural communism is not to be compulsory will deceive no one. He himself classes it with the other revolutionary tax which is specifically designed to de-
