Moral Code of the Builder of Communism

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Moral Code of the Builder of Communism was a set of twelve codified moral rules in the Soviet Union which every member of the Communist Party of the USSR and every Komsomol member were supposed to follow.

The Moral Code was adopted at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961, as part of the new Party Programme.

The very first moral principle was "Devotion to the cause of communism".

Its twelve rules may be superficially compared to the Ten Commandments, but they overlap only marginally (although in Russian-speaking books and media one may sometimes see the claims about foundations in the Bible, referring to, e.g., "he who does not work, neither shall he eat", which is Apostle Paul's dictum; also used in the 1936 Soviet Constitution). Unlike the Ten Commandments, however, the rules of the Code were not concrete rules of conduct; they were stated as the rules of attitude. For example, "You shall not commit adultery" of Moses loosely corresponds to "Mutual respect in a family, concern about the upbringing of children" of the Code.

Another notable distinction is that Moral Code speaks in terms of the relation of a person to the society, rather than in terms of personal virtues. For example, the "Do not steal" may be loosely matched to "Concern of everyone about the preservation and multiplication of the common wealth".

Four of the rules, making up one-third of the Code, are of a political character.

The Code contained a number of popular Soviet cliches; in fact it was intentionally formulated to contain catch phrases, either invented by Soviet ideologists, or borrowed. (An example of the latter one is 'All for One and One for All' ("каждый за всех, все за одного") which was borrowed from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin sometimes mentions the Code in his speeches. A notable contradiction was de-facto statewise anti-Semitism in late Soviet Union, while the "Moral Code" called for "intolerance to national and racial discord".