The Soviet Constitution: myth and reality - Richard Schifter's address before the American Bar Association in San Francisco, August 10, 1987 - transcript

US Department of State Bulletin, Oct, 1987

The Soviet Constitution: Myth and Reality

Address before the American Bar Association (ABA) in San Francisco on August 10, 1987. Ambassador Schifter is Assistant Secretary for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs.

If we were asked to identify the passage or passages in the Constitution of the United States that best characterize the nature of our government, I would assume that a good many of us would point to the Bill of Rights, particularly the First and Fifth Amendments. If the same question were asked with regard to the Soviet Constitution, I, for one, would select four key provisions.

First and foremost, I would direct attention to Article 6, which states:

The leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organizations and public organizations, is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. . . . The Communist Party . . . determines . . . the course of the domestic and foreign policy of the U.S.S.R., directs the great constructive work of the Soviet people, and imparts a planned, systematic and theoretically substantiated character to their struggle for the victory of communism.

I would then move back to Article 3 and note the following words:

The Soviet state is organized and functions on the principle of democratic centralism. . . . Democratic centralism combines central leadership with local initiative and creative activity. . . .

Next, I would drop down to Article 39, which states:

Enjoyment by citizens of their rights and freedoms must not be to the detriment of the interest of society or the state. . . .

I would round out these quotations from the Soviet Constitution with Article 59, which reads as follows:

Citizens' exercise of their rights and freedoms is inseparable from the performance of their duties and obligations.

Citizens of the U.S.S.R. are obliged to observe the Constitution of the U.S.S.R. and Soviet laws, comply with the standards of socialist conduct, and uphold the honor and dignity of Soviet citizenship.

The Role of Lenin

The Soviet Cosntitution is a lengthy document, containing altogether 174 articles. A number of them would, at first blush, remind us of guarantees of individual freedom which are the hallmark of basic charters in true democracies. To understand their meaning and significance in the Soviet setting, we need to comprehend fully just what the role of a constitution is in the U.S.S.R. and how constitutional provisions must be read in the context of the Soviet Union's basic notions of the relationship between the governing and the governed.

In seeking to construe our own Constitution, we often refer to the Federalist Papers and other writings of the Founding Fathers. Similarly, the Soviet Constitution should be interpreted in light of the writings of the Soviet Union's Founding Father. That person is, of course, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, whom the world has come to know as Lenin.

In using the term Marxism-Leninism, we often lose sight of the individuals to whose teachings we thus refer. They were, in fact, persons who differed markedly from each other. Karl Marx was a theoretician, who proclaimed to the world his purportedly scientific analyses of economics and history and who predicted future historic trends on the basis of his analyses.

Lenin, by contrast, was an activist. His writings are free of abstruse theory. They are how-to-do-it kits on seizing and holding power. To be sure, these writings were not entirely original. Their basic theses can be found in Machiavelli's The Prince, written close to 400 years before Lenin put pen to paper.

After having become familiar with Marx's writings, Lenin committed himself to helping history along by seeking to establish first in Russia and then throughout the world his own notion of Marx's vision of an ideal society. With single-minded devotion to his cause, he applied himself to the goal of taking power in Russia, a goal which he reached in the fall of 1917.

Lenin, we must note, had competition among the revolutionaries who, like he, tried to depose the czar and Russia's ruling aristocracy. His competitors included advocates of capitalist democracy as well as leftwing revolutionaries, some of them fellow Marxists. What distinguished most of them from Lenin was that, in one way or the other, they subscribed to the ideas of the role of government and of the dignity of the individual which were the essence of the teachings of the Enlightenment. These teachings, let us recall, are, indeed, the teachings to which our Founding Fathers subscribed and which provided the ideological base on which our system of government is built.

Lenin rejected these teachings, derisively referring to them as "bourgeois liberalism." His basic precepts were that the power of the state must be seized and held by an elite group, which he viewed as "the vanguard of the revolution." That vanguard was the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which later renamed itself the Communist Party. Not long after the Bolsheviks had taken power, one of Lenin's disciples and a principal leader of the new Soviet state, Grigory Zinoviev, had this to say in his report to the 11th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party: