Legal Quote of the Week: Freedom in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

ARTICLE 125. In conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed by law: freedom of speech; freedom of the press; freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings; freedom of street processions and demonstrations. These civil rights are ensured by placing at the disposal of the working people and their organizations printing presses, stocks of paper, public buildings, the streets, communications facilities and other material requisites for the exercise of these rights.
ARTICLE 126. In conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to develop the organizational initiative and political activity of the masses of the people, citizens of the U.S.S.R. are ensured the right to unite in public organizations--trade unions, cooperative associations, youth organizations,' sport and defense organizations, cultural, technical and scientific societies; and the most active and politically most conscious citizens in the ranks of the working class and other sections of the working people unite in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), which is the vanguard of the working people in their struggle to strengthen and develop the socialist system and is the leading core of all organizations of the working people, both public and state.
ARTICLE 127. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed inviolability of the person. No person may be placed under arrest except by decision of a court or with the sanction of a procurator.

-Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1936).

In a reminder that encoded law has historically often been distinct from normative law, we present these excerpts from the 1936 Soviet constitution, the second of three constitutions enacted by the USSR (this constitution replaced the one enacted in 1924, and was in turn superceded by a constitution adopted in 1977).

The great irony of the above-quoted provisions is that the Constitution of 1936 was enacted in the midst of the Great Purge, in which millions of "enemies of the State" were deported to the gulag and/or executed, in many cases for exercising the freedoms guaranteed in Articles 125 and 126, and without the benefit of the protections afforded by Article 127.

For further information, see, e.g.,  Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (Random House 2011) and Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).[1]

[1] Soviet archives indicate that during 1937 and 1938 1,548,366 people were detained for political crimes by the NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB), and that 681,692 were executed. By contrast, the government of Imperial Russia, which guaranteed no rights comparable to those in the 1936 Soviet Constitution, executed only 3,932 people for political crimes in the 85 years between 1825 and 1910 – the equivalent of four days’ worth of executions during the Great Purge.  Historians Robert Conquest and Michael Ellman, among others, believe that Soviet archives grossly understate the number of deaths, with estimates ranging between 950,000 and 1.8 million.

Category: 

Tag: 

By: