The USSR Constitution of 1936

The constitution of 1936 marked a notable break in Soviet constitutional law. That Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’, launched at the end of the 1920s, and the mass terror which followed, first bringing the ‘class war’ to the countryside, and then directing its fury against the urban elites and leading cadres of the party, should have coincided roughly with the partial restoration of traditional patterns of authority and legal stability (in ordinary civil and criminal law cases) is but one of the many paradoxes of Soviet political history. This aspect of the ‘Great Retreat’ ¹ from the aspirations of the revolution was also reflected in the 1936 constitution. It was a much more conservative document than its predecessors, more akin in both style and content to the ‘bourgeois’ constitutions so much despised in the early years. Lacking an inspirational preamble of the kind contained in the 1918 and 1924 constitutions, it was designed, as Stalin put it, to deal ‘in simple and concise terms, almost in the style of minutes, with the facts of the victory of socialism in the USSR . . . with the facts of the victory in the USSR of full and thoroughly consistent democracy’. ² As an essential part of this dual victory of socialism and democracy the constitution guaranteed the right to personal property alongside a greatly expanded list of other civil rights and freedoms, abolished all forms of class discrimination, established universal, direct and secret elections and, without renouncing its time-honoured opposition to the principle, separated the powers – or as official commentators continued to insist, the ‘functions’ – of the several state organs rather more precisely than had hitherto been the case.