Stalin's Constitution

Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution

Samantha Lomb

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351759830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Upon its adoption in December 1936, Soviet leaders hailed the new so-called Stalin Constitution as the most democratic in the world. Scholars have long scoffed at this claim, noting that the mass repression of 1937–1938 that followed rendered it a hollow document. This study does not address these competing claims, but rather focuses on the six-month long popular discussion of the draft Constitution, which preceded its formal adoption in December 1936. Drawing on rich archival sources, this book uses the discussion of the draft 1936 Constitution to examine discourse between the central state leadership and citizens about the new Soviet social contract, which delineated the roles the state and citizens should play in developing socialism. For the central leadership, mobilizing its citizenry in a variety of state building campaigns was the main goal of the discussion of the draft Constitution. However, the goals of the central leadership at times stood in stark contrast with the people's expressed interpretation of that social contract. Citizens of the USSR focused on securing rights and privileges, often related to improving their daily lives, from the central government.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315194004, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1Citizenship and a social contract

The drafting of the 1936 Constitution

Upon its adoption in December 1936, Soviet leaders hailed the new Constitution as the most democratic in the world. Western scholars and citizens have long scoffed at this claim, noting that the mass repression of 1937–1938 followed the adoption of the so-called Stalin Constitution. While the goal of this study is not to address these competing claims, the draft Constitution should be seen in the context of many leaders, including Stalin, feeling that the revolution had brought about radical changes in Soviet society, which required the re-conceptualization of certain groups’ roles in Soviet society and the Constitution to be rewritten to reflect this new balance of power. Collectivization was a “fact,” rapid industrialization was a “fact,” and Soviet power was a “fact.”¹ As a result of these achievements, the 1934 Party Congress was referred to as the “Congress of Victors,” and this victorious language is reflected in the press coverage surrounding the release of the draft Constitution two years later.

There are no documents in the archival record to contradict the Soviet leadership’s public support for a more participatory Constitution or to indicate they viewed the Constitution and the subsequent discussion as mere propaganda, as some historians suggest.² In fact, the archival records indicate that Stalin and other leaders were invested in the process, reading Western constitutions, meticulously editing the draft, and demanding accountability from regional officials for the collection of all the popular suggestions, which was in step with the Soviet Union’s, and even Tsarist Russia’s, larger history of “listening to the people.”³

While the reforms introduced in the Constitution may have been largely honored in the breach, as the mass repression of 1937 undid many of the promised changes, no one in the second half of 1936 could have anticipated such developments. As addressed more completely in Chapter 7, unexpected developments, such as unanticipated popular responses to the draft and the active participation of kulaks and other class enemies in the subsequent elections, precipitated the return to a restricted franchise and repressive measures. Other factors that influenced the Soviet State’s return to repression include Stalin’s paranoid personality, his distrust of the state and party elite, an unresponsive and obstinate regional bureaucracy, fear of potential threats from certain groups at home and abroad, and past success using repression to manage state-building efforts.⁴ Repression was a knee-jerk reaction to what Stalin and other Soviet leaders came to view as a hostile environment. This means that their sincerity in 1936 should not be called into question by the events of 1937, and in fact, their disillusionment with the incompleteness of the socialist victory and the rise of new challengers may help to explain the severity of the subsequent repression.

To grasp the reasons behind the Soviet leadership’s opening up of mass participation in 1936, and the subsequent reaction in 1937, requires a brief overview of Soviet legal and constitutional theory to understand how top leaders conceived of democracy, the role of a constitution, and what responsibilities they envisioned for citizens. Soviet conceptualizations of democracy, viewed from the perspective of those who formulated them, reveal that, within their own understanding of politics and constitutionality, their intentions were both legitimate and earnest. It also reveals how such interpretations helped to frame, but not determine, the public discussion.

The party’s central leadership had a very particular understanding of democracy and legality, which allowed for and even encouraged citizen participation. While Western scholars may see a contradiction between the tightly controlled one-party state based on the principles of democratic centralism and popular participation, no such contradiction existed in the minds of Soviet leaders. They viewed popular participation as essential for the development of the social and economic systems in the USSR, an interpretation that produced the participatory rhetoric preceding the discussion of the draft Constitution and provided the foundation for the central state leadership’s attempts to guide and manage the discussion.

The principles of constitutional theory in the USSR

The new Constitution was the centerpiece of Stalinist legal reformation and state-building efforts. The Soviet state sought to increase social stability and political legitimacy in the wake of the vast political, social, and economic upheaval brought on by the Five-Year Plans. It did so through the redefinition of Soviet citizenship to include a much broader segment of the population, such as former kulaks and other former class enemies, who were disenfranchised in the two preceding constitutions, as well as expanding citizenship rights and access to state benefits.⁵ John Hazard argues that Soviet leaders in the Stalinist period used judicial decisions and legislation to solidify their position in power and to lay the foundation for a new pattern of social organization, while at the same time to codify and solidify the changes that had already been made. In the field of criminal law, this meant attempting to make officials behave rationally, i.e., to serve socialist institutions rather than their own interests, and by repressing enemies.⁶ Other historians, such as Peter Solomon, develop this idea further. He argues that the late 1930s saw a return to traditional legal order, replacing Nikolai Krylenko’s ideas of “revolutionary legality,” which relied on proletarian intuition, with professional cadres and systemized legal codices championed by Andrei Vyshinsky.⁷ Solomon believes that the promulgation of the new Constitution in 1936 was symbolic of this shift, as the discussion of the draft Constitution provided a forum for the promotion of the status and authority of law.⁸ This study of the discussion of the draft Constitution supports Solomon’s assertion. However, Solomon views the 1936 Constitution as a farce, arguing that it never sought to promote popular participation but rather was designed to give the Soviet Union a veneer of respectability abroad and to enhance the authority and legitimacy of the Soviet government inside the country’s borders.⁹ In contrast to Solomon, Stephen Kotkin asserts that “not only could the USSR under Stalin plausibly claim that it had developed the programs and practices of state-guaranteed social welfare to a greater extent than had previously been the case anywhere, but it could do so in a way that contrasted with the fascist reaction: by embracing fully the illustrious European heritage known as the Enlightenment.”¹⁰ This work asserts that Soviet leaders viewed participatory politics as a tool for socialist construction rather than an end in itself, but in formulating and promoting the Stalinist Constitution, Party and state leaders paid homage to the European roots of democracy.

The Constitutional Drafting Commission consulted multiple “bourgeois,” i.e., Western constitutions, and ensconced many of the ideals of universal suffrage, popular participation, and the responsiveness of the state to its constituency in the draft. Karl Radek was charged with gathering the texts of foreign constitutions and appropriate laws and reviewing them along with Nikolai Bukharin (the editor of Izvestiia from 1934) and Lev Mekhlis (the editor of Pravda in 1936).¹¹ The collected materials of the Constitutional Commission contain election laws from England, Belgium, Germany, Norway, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland, copies of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (1789), and various Western (bourgeois) constitutions.¹² Although the archive does not contain notes on the discussion of these materials, when describing the proposed electoral system in 1937, Kalinin noted that the new Soviet system would resemble the French electoral system.¹³ And Molotov stated, “all the best [parts] of the democratic systems of other states we brought in and added to our Constitution to apply to the conditions of the Soviet state.”¹⁴

In order to appreciate what aspects of European constitutional theory the Soviet leadership incorporated into the 1936 Stalinist Constitution, it is imperative to understand what role Bolsheviks believed that a constitution should play in Soviet society. Party and state leaders viewed the Constitution as the codification of the achievements of socialism, rather than a document that identified aspirational goals or guiding principles. In his November 1936 speech to the 8th Congress of Soviets, Stalin made it clear that the Constitution should not be confused with a program:

a program talks about what does not yet exist and that which must be obtained and won in the future, the Constitution on the other hand, must speak about what already exists, what has already been obtained and won now, in the present.¹⁵

Nikolai Krylenko,¹⁶ People’s Commissar of Justice (July 20, 1936–September 15, 1937) and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Archival abbreviations
• List of Russian terms
• Introduction
• 1 Citizenship and a social contract: The drafting of the 1936 Constitution
• 2 Daily life in Kirov in the 1930s
• 3 Local realities : The implementation of the discussion of the draft Constitution
• 4 Validators of socialist victory : The discussion in the local press
• 5 Popular voices: Interpreting citizens’ rights and duties
• 6 Integration, exclusion, and accountability
• 7 The Constitution, the 1937 elections, and repression
• Conclusion
• Notes on sources
• The draft Constitution of the USSR
• Bibliography
• Index