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

What Gorbachev and his friends are attempting to strip from the operations of the Soviet system, in the name of glasnost, are the features of oriental despotism initially imbedded in the Leninist construct by Joseph Stalin. These include severe punishment for the mere expression of dissenting opinions, rigid limitations upon allowed literary expression, state control over all other forms of artistic endeavor, punishment for criticism of any state official or any official action, etc. Under glasnost all of these Stalinist controls are to be relaxed. The petty tyrannies of local officials are to be ended, as efforts are made to have the lower levels of the bureaucracy operate under the rule of law. But, and this is a point that must be kept in mind, there are to be limits to the relaxation. Nothing is or will be allowed that might threaten the control of the state by the party, as guaranteed by Article 6 of the Constitution. Gorbachev and his colleagues reject, as did Lenin before them, "bourgeois democracy." Their goal is to return to the practices of the Soviet system in the early 1920s, in the time of Lenin and the years immediately after his death. Their notion is to live by Lenin's precepts, not to abandon them.

It is important to note in this context that Stalinism is now being stripped from the Soviet system for the second time. It was initially exorcised by Nikita Khrushchev, back in the 1950s. It evidently sprouted again after Khrushchev's removal, even though not driven by paranoia of the same intensity as under Stalin. What the Soviets really should ask themselves is whether a Leninist system, without any checks and balances, will inevitably, over time, develop Stalinist features and whether, therefore, in the absence of fundamental change, Gorbachev's glasnost is not likely to go the way of

Khrushchev's thaw, with the country returning to another form of despotic rule.

As I have noted, the Soviet governmental system is characterized by an absence of checks and balances, by an absence of a constitutional framework which guarantees individual rights against the highest state authority. It is for that reason that the operation of the entire system is so critically dependent on the outlook and attitude of the person or persons who at any one time control the principal levers of power in the Soviet Union. As Dr. Koryagin--the Soviet psychiatrist who has recently been released from prison--has had occasion to observe, the somewhat greater freedom of expression now allowed in the Soviet Union is not guaranteed, it is permitted, and permission can at any time be withdrawn.

Though the Soviet leadership does not appear to have any present intention of abandoning the basic precepts on which its system of government rests, that does not mean that no change will ever occur. Having gotten in recent months at least a whiff of greater freedom, some Soviet citizens might be willing to learn how other societies go about the task of assuring respect for individual rights. And who would be better equipped to talk to them about this subject than those whose professional responsibility it is in a democratic country to see that the rights of the individual are protected?