First Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Yury Afonin commented on the anniversary of the adoption of the 1936 USSR Constitution for the Svobodnaya Pressa portal. His main conclusion: billions of people around the world can still only dream of the social guarantees provided to citizens by Stalin’s Constitution.
Today is the 89th anniversary of the adoption of the USSR Constitution of 1936, widely known as the Stalin Constitution.
Why should we, living in the 21st century, remember this Constitution?
Let’s start with the fact that the scope of rights and social guarantees this Constitution granted to the citizens of our country was simply fantastic for its time. The right to work and the right to rest. An eight-hour workday and state-paid annual leave. Free education. Free healthcare. The right to financial security in old age, as well as in cases of illness and disability. Complete equality of men and women. Complete equality of all nationalities. And this in a world still full of vestiges of feudalism. Where fascism was rearing its head. In an era when two-thirds of the planet’s population lived in colonies and semi-colonies, and women in many countries not only lacked the right to vote but were hardly considered fully human.
Almost 90 years have passed since then, a seemingly vast period of social development. Of course, the constitutions of various countries have become much more progressive, incorporating many norms that first appeared in the USSR Constitution. But even today, hundreds of millions of people are unemployed and homeless. Funds for the treatment of sick children are collected from the streets, so universally accessible free healthcare is more fiction than reality. There are still dozens of countries around the world where either no pension system exists at all, or only government employees receive pensions. In short, if everyone on the planet were given Chapter X of the 1936 USSR Constitution, which deals with rights and social guarantees, to read, most would be genuinely shocked: is this even possible?
How was the USSR able to provide its citizens with such a comprehensive range of social guarantees 89 years ago? The answer lies in Stalin’s Constitution, Article 6: “The land, its mineral wealth, waters, forests, factories, mines, quarries, rail, water, and air transport, banks, communications, large agricultural enterprises organized by the state, as well as public utilities and the main housing stock in cities and industrial centers are state property, that is, the property of the entire people.” The 1936 Constitution enshrined this provision, but the course toward turning all the country’s main resources into public property had been set much earlier, back in the 1920s. This social structure enabled colossal progress. Between 1929 and 1936, industrial production in the USSR quadrupled! Meanwhile, the capitalist world was experiencing the Great Depression at this time. In the United States, industrial production was lower in 1936 than in 1929.
It was precisely the rapid growth of the Soviet economy and the concentration of all resources in the hands of the people that made it possible to make a reality all those social guarantees that were included in the new Constitution of the USSR in 1936.
For decades, we were fed the image of Stalin’s Soviet Union as a terrifying dictatorship. But the very adoption of the 1936 Constitution demonstrates that, on the contrary, never in our country’s thousand-year history have the people so actively participated in governing the state. Stalin’s Constitution was largely written by the masses. Judge for yourself. The development and adoption of the Constitution took approximately two years. First, a constitutional commission, 12 subcommittees, and numerous working groups, involving hundreds of specialists from all spheres of society, developed the initial draft. It was published in all the country’s newspapers, broadcast on the radio, and also published as a special brochure with a circulation of over 10 million copies in 100 languages of the peoples of the USSR. The Constitution was widely discussed at rallies and meetings. Soviet citizens proposed approximately two million amendments to the draft! Of course, many of them overlapped. Nevertheless, the organizational department of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR reviewed 13,721 amendments. The Constitution was adopted by the Extraordinary Eighth Congress of Soviets of the USSR. The Congress met for 11 days, thoroughly discussed the text, and introduced 48 more amendments before its final adoption. There simply isn’t, and never has been, a Constitution in the world that was drafted so democratically, literally by the entire people.
The 1936 Constitution had another very important feature. It was a Constitution of Reconciliation. From 1918 to 1936, the Soviet Union had so-called “disenfranchised”—individuals deprived of the right to vote and limited in a number of other rights. These included the bourgeoisie, including rentiers, private traders, and kulaks, as well as the clergy and former employees and agents of the tsarist police and gendarmerie. This was a measure of self-defense by the Soviet government against people who could be hostile to it, and often were. But the 1936 Constitution granted absolutely equal rights to all citizens. All “former” citizens were given the opportunity to become part of the working people’s state. And most did. This was demonstrated by the Great Patriotic War, when many thousands of former kulaks and NEPmen and their children performed heroic deeds in defense of the USSR.
About five years ago, a Russian film about a famous heroine of the Great Patriotic War was released. Unfortunately, it’s very weak. There’s a scene where the heroine is asked: why is she going to her death? At the behest of the screenwriters, she gives a nonsense answer: “for a bun and a tram.” Don’t believe such movie-making, friends. Soviet people understood very well what they were fighting for. That’s why over 5 million people joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) during the war, even though the Nazis would have shot you on sight for having a party card in your pocket.
Our grandfathers fought with incredible heroism for a new, just society, the fundamental principles of which were described in the Constitution adopted on December 5, 1936.
The USSR lived under this Constitution from 1936 to 1977. The Stalin Constitution is the Constitution of Victory, the Constitution of the fastest economic growth rates in world history, the Constitution of a breakthrough into space.
This Constitution reminds us that our country was the undisputed leader of global social progress in the 20th century. Let us strive to restore this leadership to Russia in the 21st century.
I couldnt read all of it but it does read really good so far.
It always makes me snap when the western chauvinists suggest “putin promote stalin because imperialism”. Its ultrashort thinking imo. I of course might be overlooking stuff but i think nobody who has actually read stuff from stalin would think he was a dictator or an imperialist and I dont think putin would benefit from this kind of shit nor would he be stupid enough to descend to petty ideological demamgoguery like this. Again, i hope i’m not wrong. Let me know if i am.
