No person may be placed under arrest except by
decision of a court or with the sanction of a procurator.
decision of a court or with the sanction of a procurator.
Soviet Union - 1952 - Soviet Civilization
S.
R.
have the right to work, that is,
are guaranteed the right to employment and payment
for their work in accordance with its quantity and qual-
ity. The right to work is ensured by the socialist organi-
zation of the national economy, the steady growth of the
73
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
productive forces of Soviet society, the elimination of
the possibility of economic crises, and the abolition of
unemployment. "
Although we must keep a weather eye on future
developments, it does indeed seem true that Soviet social-
ism, without depending on the stimulus of armaments
or war, has been able to eliminate the general economic
crises and mass unemployment characteristic of the cap-
italist world. This is why the Constitution dares declare,
in effect, that unemployment is unconstitutional.
The next Article also deals with economic affairs:
"The right to rest and leisure is ensured by the establish-
ment of the eight-hour workday for office employees and
by reducing the workday to seven and six hours for a
number of arduous professions and to four hours in
factory shops with particularly arduous working condi-
tions; by establishing annual vacations with full pay for
workers and office employees; by providing a wide net-
work of sanitariums, rest homes and clubs to serve the
working people. "
Vacations with pay in Soviet Russia range from two
weeks to two months. There are of course a multitude
of opportunities for recreation. In every town and city --
and in most villages -- there is at least one public library.
Theatre and opera, concert and motion picture are avail-
able to everyone. The municipalities and the trade
unions provide ample facilities for sports. The "parks
of culture and rest," offering the most varied recreational
programs, are outstanding features in most Soviet cities.
Outdoor life, taking advantage of river, lake, beach,
mountain and forest, is encouraged throughout the
U. S. S. R.
Article 120 is concerned with various forms of social
74
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET CONSTITUTION
security: "Citizens of the U. S. S. R. have the right to
maintenance in old age and also in case of sickness or
loss of capacity to work. This right is ensured by the
extensive development of social insurance of workers
and employees at state expense, free medical service for
the working people and the provision of a wide network
of health resorts for the use of the working people. "
It is to be noted that in this Article covering social
security there is no mention of unemployment insurance,
which had been guaranteed by the Soviet Labor Code
up till 1930 and which is of such vital importance in
capitalist countries. To repeat, involuntary unemploy-
ment has disappeared in the U. S. S. R. , and so unemploy-
ment insurance would be superfluous. Old age pensions
begin at the age of fifty-five for women and at sixty for
men. The free medical service includes dental care.
In the United States we are accustomed to hear viru-
lent criticism of socialized medicine, but this new system
of health instituted in the U. S. S. R. is, in my judgment,
one of the greatest of Soviet achievements. England
under the Labor Government successfully established a
similar system. I do not claim that every Soviet citizen
is obtaining the best medical care; for Soviet medicine
still lacks adequate supplies and a sufficient number of
well-trained physicians. I do claim, however, that no one
in Soviet Russia lacks proper medical service because he
cannot afford it.
The fact is that the health of the Soviet people has
made tremendous progress since 1917. The chief en-
demic diseases of Tsarist times, such as bubonic plague,
cholera, smallpox, typhus and venereal disease, are vir-
tually non-existent today. The number of typhoid cases
are more than 80 percent below the 1913 level and the
75
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
incidence of tuberculosis more than 40 percent below it.
The death rate among adults has fallen over 65 percent
since 1913 and that of children by even more. The Soviet
public health system emphasizes preventive medicine.
Dr. Henry Sigerist, formerly of Johns Hopkins Univers-
ity and an expert on Soviet medicine, has estimated that
in the U. S. S. R. the equivalent of $27 out of $30 of med-
ical expenditures goes to prevention as compared with
only $1 out of $30 in America.
The next Article in the Soviet Constitution on the
new rights of man brings us into the field of culture:
"Citizens of the U. S. S. R. have the right to education.
This right is ensured by universal, compulsory, elemen-
tary education; by free seven-year education; by a system
of state stipends to the outstanding students in higher
schools; by instruction in schools being conducted in the
native language, and by the organization in the factories,
state farms, machine and tractor stations and collective
farms of free vocational, technical and agronomic train-
ing for the working people. "
Day nurseries under the Ministry of Public Health
care for infants from thirty-six days old through the age
of three. Kindergartens take children from three to seven.
Neither kindergartens nor nurseries are compulsory.
Both charge working mothers a nominal fee amounting
to one day's pay a month. Only a small proportion of
Soviet mothers take advantage of the creche and kinder-
garten system. Free, universal, compulsory education
extends from the age of seven through thirteen; and the
eventual aim is to make it so for everyone up to eighteen.
Although a capitalist democracy like the United
States does not make any guarantee about education in
its Constitution, it does by law have free, compulsory
76
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
elementary education and a free liberal arts education
or vocational training at the high school and college
levels for those who wish it and can afford to remain
without a paying job. Hence the provisions in the Soviet
Constitution concerning education, while they mark a
signal improvement over Tsarist days, are not excep-
tional. The educational upsurge that has taken place
in the U. S. S. R. since 1917 has not been confined to youth
or based merely on state-run institutions. Serious adult
education has been a pervasive phenomenon and special
educational enterprises have been a regular part of the
activities of labor unions, the Communist Party and the
Soviet army.
In article 122 we come again to a unique constitu-
tional provision: "Women in the U. S. S. R. are accorded
equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state,
cultural, social and political life. The possibility of
exercising these rights is ensured to women by granting
them an equal right with men to work, payment for work,
rest and leisure, social insurance and education, by state
protection of the interests of mother and child, by state
aid to mothers of large families and unmarried mothers,
prematernity and maternity leave with full pay, and the
provision of a wide network of maternity homes, nur-
series and kindergartens. "
Lenin once said that no nation can be free when half
its population, the women, are household slaves and
doomed to "daily sacrifice to a thousand unimportant
trivialities. "4 This statement applies to all countries, but
it had special relevance for Tsarist Russia in which
women were almost universally treated as basically in-
ferior to men. An old Russian proverb stressed the in-
herent inferiority of the female sex: "A hen is no bird,
77
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
and a woman is no human being. " Other Russian say-
ings indicate the harsh treatment that women in Tsarist
days were likely to receive: "Love your wife like your
soul, but thrash her like a pear tree"; "Beat your wife,
the food will be tastier. "
The Soviet Government not only reversed the former
Russian attitude toward women, but went ahead of any
other country in eradicating exploitation of woman by
man and establishing full sex equality in all relevant
ways. This means much more than giving women the
suffrage, a right granted even in the United States and
Great Britain only during the past few decades. Soviet
theory and practice extend equality between the sexes
to the relationship between husband and wife, to eco-
nomic and professional activity, to educational and cul-
tural opportunity, and to participation in every form of
political life.
In the 1937 elections 16. 5 percent of the deputies
chosen for the Supreme Soviet of the U. S. S. R. were
women; in both the 1946 and 1950 elections the per-
centage increased to about 21 as compared with less than
2 percent in the United States Congress for the same years.
Hundreds of women are members of the Supreme Soviets
of the Union and Autonomous Republics. All Soviet
judges and jurors are elected; and in 1949 over 39 percent
of them were women. In 1951 approximately 413,000
women were students in higher educational institutions
and comprised more than 30 percent of the student body.
In the same year more than 40 percent of all persons
employed in the national economy were women. Over
383,000 women were working as engineers and tech-
nicians and over 1,000,000 in the public health system,
including 191,000 qualified physicians and surgeons.
78
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
The Soviet policy does not neglect the biological
function of women as mothers, and indeed extends to
mother and child every possible protection. Sex equality
in Soviet Russia has certainly not led to the break-up of
home life; and there is much evidence that it has brought
increasing stability to the family as an institution. The
system of easy divorces characteristic of the early post-
revolutionary years has given way to a tightening of the
marital bond through making divorces more difficult and
expensive; and to an emphasis on building up a psycho-
logically adjusted and permanent family unit. Grounds
for divorce are desertion, mental disease, the sentencing
of one spouse to three or more years in jail and other
weighty reasons satisfying to the People's Courts. Birth
control techniques are legal, but not encouraged.
In any case we must guard against the fallacy of think-
ing that Soviet sex equality, or any other social-economic
reforms in the U. S. S. R. , can automatically solve the com-
plex problems of sex relations and of women's role in
home management. At the same time we are warranted
in doubting whether the exigencies of the cold war justify
the Soviet Government's policy of refusing to allow Soviet
women married to foreigners to join their husbands
abroad.
The Soviet Constitution takes another epoch-making
step forward in the next Article (123), which ensures
ethnic democracy: "Equality of rights of citizens of the
U. S. S. R. , irrespective of their nationality or race, in all
spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political
life, is an indefeasible law. Any direct or indirect restric-
tion of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of
direct or indirect privileges for, citizens on account of
their race or nationality, as well as any advocacy of racial
79
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIE7 CIVILIZATION
or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is
punishable by law. " The Soviet attitude toward racial
and national minorities within the U. S. S. R. is fraught
with world-wide significance, particularly in view of the
fascist attempt in World War II to foist permanently on
mankind a program of racial prejudice and oppression
and in view of the present distressing minorities situa-
tions in such nations as the United States and South
Africa.
Article 124 concerns the much misunderstood Soviet
attitude toward religion: "In order to ensure to citizens
freedom of conscience, the Church in the U. S. S. R. is
separated from the State, and the school from the Church.
Freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-relig-
ious propaganda is recognized for all citizens. " In the
old Russia the Orthodox Eastern Church was the official
state church and had a controlling voice in the educa-
tional system. A large part of the outcry against the Soviet
Government's treatment of religion has been due precise-
ly to its taking over a principle long established in the
United States, namely, the separation of state and reli-
gion and of school and religion.
A more friendly feeling between government and
church has recently developed in the Soviet Union for
the reason that the Orthodox Church gave such loyal
support in resisting the Nazi invasion. However, it is my
belief that on the whole there has been true freedom
of worship, despite some local excesses against the Church
authorities in the early years, since the Revolution of
1917. There has actually been more religious freedom
than under the Tsars in the sense that the disestablished
Orthodox Church has no longer been able to persecute
minority Protestant, Hebrew and Mohammedan sects;
80
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
and so all religions under the Soviets have legally stood
on a plane of equality. In a later chapter I shall go into
the details of the status of religion in Soviet Russia. *
The next few Articles cover the controversial topic of
civil liberties in the Soviet Union. Article 125 states:
"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 prerequisites for the exercise of these
rights. " Article 127 guarantees the "inviolability of the
person.
No person may be placed under arrest except by
decision of a court or with the sanction of a procurator. "
Article 128 reads: "The inviolability of the homes of
citizens and privacy of correspondence are protected by
law. "
The opening statement on civil liberties obviously
qualifies freedom of opinion by the clause "in order to
strengthen the socialist system. " This definitely implies
that those who are opposed to socialism in Soviet Russia
are not granted the right to express their opposition. In-
dividuals in favor of the restoration of Tsarism or the
capitalist system would quickly get into hot water if they
attempted to express their views. Soviet practice up to
date has gone further and has denied freedom of opinion
to citizens who, even while agreeing that socialism is the
goal, continue to take issue, after a policy decision has
? See p. 121.
81
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
been made, with basic Communist Party or government
directives.
In his book, The Law of the Soviet State, Andrei Y.
Vishinsky, former Procurator-General (Attorney Gen-
eral) of the U. S. S. R. and since 1949 Minister of Foreign
Affairs, asserted: "In our state, naturally there is and can
be no place for freedom of speech, press and so on for the
foes of socialism. "5 How flagrant a violation of civil
liberties this amounts to becomes clear if we apply the
converse of the principle expressed to the capitalist
United States. Then we would have: "Under the Bill
of Rights, naturally there can be no place for freedom
of speech, press, assembly and political organization for
the enemies of capitalism. "
Nevertheless, Soviet citizens retain a wide area for
the operation of free speech in the determination of
policy, up to the point when a final decision is taken, and
in criticism of the way in which policy is carried out.
Soviet workers have been outspoken in their slashing
criticism of economic affairs, factory officials and govern-
ment bureaucrats. This constant self-criticism in the
Soviet Union has become a well-established institution
and provides hostile foreign writers with a great deal of
ammunition for exposing bureaucracy, inefficiencies and
other defects in the Soviet system. We can express the
situation in this manner: Within a limited yet fairly broad
circle of controversial subjects Soviet citizens have full
latitude of speech, but when they go outside that circle
to question settled government policies or fundamental
Marxist principles, their freedom of speech is drastically
curtailed.
The second part of Article 125 underlines once more
the stress that the Soviets put on the economic implemen-
82
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
tation of civil liberties. What use is freedom of the press
unless printing presses and stocks of paper are available?
What good are constitutional guarantees for freedom of
opinion unless the people have "the material requisites
for the exercise of these rights"? Soviet political scientists
make the claim that in the capitalist countries the work-
ers, especially, do not possess these material requisites
because they lack in general the financial means to hire
printing presses, print newspapers and magazines, rent
meeting halls and buy radio time. Capitalist democracies,
Soviet critics go on to say, talk a lot about the abstract
forms of civil liberty, but do not give those forms sub-
stance in economic realities.
The Communists also argue that in capitalist coun-
tries, although governmental authorities crack down only
too often on freedom of speech, the main incidence of
censorship comes from pressures by private businessmen
and corporations that own and operate at least 95 percent
of the press, the radio, the movies and book publishing.
These prime mediums of communication are slanted
overwhelmingly on the capitalist side of every fundamen-
tal issue and need no government prompting to carry on
a constant campaign against socialist and Communist
doctrines. What this amounts to, the argument concludes,
is that under capitalism there is a pervasive private and
voluntary censorship of ideas which is less honest yet just
as effective as the open government censorship in the
Soviet Union.
The remaining articles in Chapter X are primarily
concerned with the duties of Soviet citizens, such as ob-
servance of the laws, maintaining labor discipline and
taking part in universal military service. Article 131 is
particularly worth quoting: "It is the duty of every
83
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
citizen of the U. S. S. R. to safeguard and strengthen public,
socialist property as the sacred and inviolable foundation
of the Soviet system, as the source of the wealth and
might of the country, as the source of the prosperous and
cultured life of all the working people. Persons commit-
ting offenses against public, socialist property are enemies
of the people. "
The new rights of man guaranteed in the Soviet
Constitution show more clearly than any other section
of that document the ideals toward which Soviet social-
ism is driving. Some of those ideals have already been
largely fulfilled. It is no small thing for the Soviet Re-
public to have abolished unemployment and depression,
to have provided social insurance and free medical care
for all, and to have established racial, economic and
educational democracy as well as equality between the
sexes. It is the challenge of such achievements which, as
Edward H. Carr, a British professor of international poli-
tics, shows in his illuminating book, The Soviet Impact
on the Western World, has led to much salutary social
and economic legislation in the West during the past
two decades. These accomplishments of the U. S. S. R. are
either slighted or not mentioned at all in the great hue
and cry which anti-Soviet forces are continually stirring
up.
Naturally those hostile to Soviet Russia concentrate
on its salient weaknesses, such as the state of civil lib-
erties and of political democracy. Any impartial ob-
server of the Soviet scene must admit that the Socialist
Republic limps and lags in these two significant criteria
of a civilized nation. Despotic practices inherited from
Tsardom, the historical Russian pattern of exalting the
community above individual rights, the long tradition --
84
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
fostered by the Orthodox Church -- of the principle of
unanimous agreement on important issues, the domestic
turbulence and hatreds resulting from the greatest revo-
lution in history, the fear and actuality of foreign ag-
gression, and the Marxist theory of proletarian dictator-
ship have all combined to hold back the evolution of
civil liberties and political democracy in the Soviet
Union.
Many people in the Western democracies thought
that the famous Moscow Trials of 1936-38, in which a
number of prominent Communist leaders were convicted
of treason, were a ghastly travesty on due process of law
and were complete frame-ups. I myself, after reading
carefully the voluminous verbatim testimony in the three
big trials -- something which few critics of Soviet justice
have bothered to do -- became convinced that the defend-
ants' sweeping confessions were genuine and that they
were indeed guilty of conspiring with Leon Trotsky and
outright fascist agents to overthrow the Soviet Govern-
ment. Since Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and the others
firmly believed that Stalin had betrayed socialism both
at home and abroad, they felt justified as revolutionaries
in adopting any methods whatever to get rid of his re-
gime.
At the same time, when fascist plotting under the
direction of Hitler and Mussolini was making such head-
way throughout the European continent, it was too much
to expect that Soviet Russia had become so stable that
there could be no fifth column within it. Actually, many
of those who denounced the Moscow Trials naively
assumed that political progress had been so rapid in the
Soviet Union that it was simply impossible for a con-
spiracy linked with the Fascist-Nazi Axis to find root
85
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
there. During this trying period miscarriages of justice
occurred, in my judgment, not in the Moscow Trials, but
in the general purges that accompanied them throughout
the country and in which many innocent persons suffered.
Furthermore, the feeling against Trotsky was so extreme
that the Soviet authorities not only condemned him as
a traitor -- which he was -- but took the lamentable and
ludicrous step of re-writing history in an endeavor to
erase from the records all accounts of the leading role
he played in the 1917 Revolution and in the defense of
the Socialist Republic during its initial stages.
In his memoirs of the pre-war years Winston
Churchill makes a most significant comment on the Mos-
cow Trials. He relates that while President Benes of
Czechoslovakia was bickering with Hitler in the fall of
1936, "he became aware that communications were pass-
ing through the Soviet Embassy in Prague between im-
portant personages in Russia and the German Govern-
ment. This was part of the so-called Old-Guard Com-
munist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin, and introduce a
new regime based on a pro-German policy. President
Benes lost no time in communicating all he could find
out to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless,
but perhaps not needless, military and political purge
in Soviet Russia and the series of trials in January, 1937,
in which Vishinsky, the Public Prosecutor, played so
masterful a part. "6
To see the Soviet picture clearly we must also recog-
nize that history shows that far-reaching revolutions have
usually given rise to the most unscrupulous conduct and
to bitter, throat-cutting dissension among the revolu-
tionaries themselves. Sidney and Beatrice Webb give
us the historical perspective: "Even England and Scot-
86
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOX
land, in the small population of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, with a much less fundamental revo-
lution, produced generation after generation of conspira-
tors, to whom treason and killing, with lies and deceit,
were only part of what they felt to be a righteous ef-
fort. . . .
"The French Revolution of 1789-95 ushered in a
similar period of conspiracy and struggle, leading to a
whole succession of counter-revolutions, not reaching the
stability of a democratic republic, with its large measure
of personal security and social equality, for nearly a
century. . . . In Russia [which was in 1900 in the matter
of morals and civilization very much where Britain and
France stood in 1700] the pattern of behavior of the
revolutionary conspirators culminated in a bitterness
and mutual antagonism more acute and all-pervading
than in any other example. "7
Especially since the end of World War II reckless
charges have been made that the Soviet Union is a hor-
rible slave state keeping from ten to twenty million
people at forced labor in concentration camps situated
in Siberia and other places. While there is no question
that the Soviet authorities have isolated political prisoners
and ordinary criminals in special work camps, the num-
bers involved have steadily declined in recent years and
have at no time reached the huge totals conjured up in
the lurid imaginations of anti-Soviet propagandists.
The Soviet Government has from its earliest years
prided itself on its method of retraining and rehabilitat-
ing prisoners of whatever variety for a normal life in the
community by giving them useful work to do while im-
prisoned. One of the chief aims of this procedure is to
ensure a good job for the prisoner when he is finally re-
87
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
leased and to make certain that society does not perma-
nently boycott him for his original offense. Prior to the
Second World War penologists from foreign countries
had frequently praised this Soviet system of curative
work as highly intelligent and effective. Now, with
malice aforethought, the same thing is stigmatized as
"slave labor" as part of an endeavor to indict the total-
ity of Soviet civilization.
These remarks are not intended to negate the fact
that the administration of justice in the Soviet Union
has been biased and harsh towards those considered
enemies of the socialist state; that the Soviet authorities,
relying on an omnipresent secret police, have jailed tens
of thousands of blameless individuals in their periodic
purges; and that Soviet prisons and labor camps have
frequently failed to maintain decent and healthy condi-
tions. In a country where general standards of living have
remained comparatively low, the life of political and
other prisoners is likely to be on a correspondingly low
plane. We can accept as true many of the bitter experi-
ences related by escaped Soviet prisoners without gener-
alizing their reports into a condemnation of the entire
Soviet system of penology.
In 1949 the Soviet Government expelled an American
writer, Miss Anna Louise Strong, as a foreign agent and
a spy without giving her a proper opportunity for legal
defense or even explaining what precisely were the
charges against her. I am glad to say that later, during
1950, my wife and I organized a group of American writ-
ers and intellectuals who sent a vigorous letter on the
Strong case to Mr. Alexander S. Panyushkin, Soviet Am-
bassador to the United States from 1947 to 1952. This
communication urged the Soviet Government "to review
88
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
carefully the case of Anna Louise Strong and to see
whether some mistake was not made regarding her by
the Soviet Security police or other officials in immediate
charge. "8 Nothing ever came of this protest.
Persons like myself, who believe firmly in the Western
ideals of individual liberty and the toleration of dissent,
often as these ideals have been thwarted or betrayed in
the West, have the obligation to continue our criticism of
Soviet institutions insofar as they do not measure up
to true democratic standards.
It would be possible to write a book of considerable
length concerning the violation of civil liberties and
political democracy in Soviet Russia. In fact author
after author has done this very thing, as if the repressive
aspects of the Soviet dictatorship were the complete story
about the U. S. S. R. Yet despite all the legitimate quali-
fications about Soviet political life, the Soviet Consti-
tution itself clearly belongs on the positive side of the
ledger. It is a document that does great credit to its
framers and that presents a grand design of human living
of which the Soviet people can well be proud.
89
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? CHAPTER III SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
1. Soviet National and Racial Minorities
Take the map of the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub-
lics and identify, each with a distinct color, the homeland
of each of the 577 Soviet races, nationalities or tribesT
and you will have an incomparable crazy-quilt of gay
and gaudy hue. For within the sprawling boundaries of
the U. S. S. R. and amongst its population of 210,000,000
there are scattered a greater number of different ethnic
groups, both large and small, maintaining their separate
territories and cultures, than in any other country on
earth. (They speak over 125 different languages and dia-
lects and practice as many as forty different religions! /
Most people outside the Soviet Union still refer to
that country as "Russia. " This is incorrect, since the
Russian Republic is only one of the sixteen main repub-
lics of the U. S. S. R. and the Russians themselves come to
only a little more than half of the total Soviet popula-
tion. A prime reason for Lenin and his associates choos-
ing the official title, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
for the new state was to try to make sure that none of the
minority races and nationalities of the former Russian
Empire would feel subordinate, as in pre-revolutionary
days, to the large Russian majority. The idea implied
in the very name was that all the racial and national
90
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
groups in the confederation would stand on a plane of
freedom and equality.
The Soviet policy toward minorities goes back to the
earliest period of the 1917 Revolution. On November
15, nine days after it came into power, the Soviet Gov-
ernment issued, under the signatures of Lenin as Premier
and Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, a revolutionary
document entitled, \HThe Declaration of the Rights of
the Peoples of Russia. " This emancipation proclama-
tion for ethnic minorities, unique in the annals of state-
craft up to that time, pledged the Communist regime
to support the following four basic principles: (1) "The
equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia; (2) the
right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination,
even to the extent of separation and the formation of
independent states; (3) the abolition of all national and
national-religious privileges and restrictions; and (4) the
free development of the national minorities and ethnic
groups inhabiting Russia. "1"!
Before many weeks had passed the Soviet Govern-
ment made another significant pronouncement directed
to the Moslem peoples of the former Tsarist Empire.
"Moslems of Russia," it began, "Tatars of the Volga and
Crimea, Kirgiz and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks
and Tatars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and Mountain-
eers of the Caucasus -- all those whose mosques and
chapels have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs
have been trampled under foot by the Tsars and oppres-
sors of Russia! Henceforth your beliefs and customs,
your national and cultural institutions are free and in-
violable. Build your national life free and unhindered.
You have a right to do so. Know that your rights, as well
as the rights of all peoples of Russia, are protected by the
91
? ?
are guaranteed the right to employment and payment
for their work in accordance with its quantity and qual-
ity. The right to work is ensured by the socialist organi-
zation of the national economy, the steady growth of the
73
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
productive forces of Soviet society, the elimination of
the possibility of economic crises, and the abolition of
unemployment. "
Although we must keep a weather eye on future
developments, it does indeed seem true that Soviet social-
ism, without depending on the stimulus of armaments
or war, has been able to eliminate the general economic
crises and mass unemployment characteristic of the cap-
italist world. This is why the Constitution dares declare,
in effect, that unemployment is unconstitutional.
The next Article also deals with economic affairs:
"The right to rest and leisure is ensured by the establish-
ment of the eight-hour workday for office employees and
by reducing the workday to seven and six hours for a
number of arduous professions and to four hours in
factory shops with particularly arduous working condi-
tions; by establishing annual vacations with full pay for
workers and office employees; by providing a wide net-
work of sanitariums, rest homes and clubs to serve the
working people. "
Vacations with pay in Soviet Russia range from two
weeks to two months. There are of course a multitude
of opportunities for recreation. In every town and city --
and in most villages -- there is at least one public library.
Theatre and opera, concert and motion picture are avail-
able to everyone. The municipalities and the trade
unions provide ample facilities for sports. The "parks
of culture and rest," offering the most varied recreational
programs, are outstanding features in most Soviet cities.
Outdoor life, taking advantage of river, lake, beach,
mountain and forest, is encouraged throughout the
U. S. S. R.
Article 120 is concerned with various forms of social
74
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET CONSTITUTION
security: "Citizens of the U. S. S. R. have the right to
maintenance in old age and also in case of sickness or
loss of capacity to work. This right is ensured by the
extensive development of social insurance of workers
and employees at state expense, free medical service for
the working people and the provision of a wide network
of health resorts for the use of the working people. "
It is to be noted that in this Article covering social
security there is no mention of unemployment insurance,
which had been guaranteed by the Soviet Labor Code
up till 1930 and which is of such vital importance in
capitalist countries. To repeat, involuntary unemploy-
ment has disappeared in the U. S. S. R. , and so unemploy-
ment insurance would be superfluous. Old age pensions
begin at the age of fifty-five for women and at sixty for
men. The free medical service includes dental care.
In the United States we are accustomed to hear viru-
lent criticism of socialized medicine, but this new system
of health instituted in the U. S. S. R. is, in my judgment,
one of the greatest of Soviet achievements. England
under the Labor Government successfully established a
similar system. I do not claim that every Soviet citizen
is obtaining the best medical care; for Soviet medicine
still lacks adequate supplies and a sufficient number of
well-trained physicians. I do claim, however, that no one
in Soviet Russia lacks proper medical service because he
cannot afford it.
The fact is that the health of the Soviet people has
made tremendous progress since 1917. The chief en-
demic diseases of Tsarist times, such as bubonic plague,
cholera, smallpox, typhus and venereal disease, are vir-
tually non-existent today. The number of typhoid cases
are more than 80 percent below the 1913 level and the
75
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
incidence of tuberculosis more than 40 percent below it.
The death rate among adults has fallen over 65 percent
since 1913 and that of children by even more. The Soviet
public health system emphasizes preventive medicine.
Dr. Henry Sigerist, formerly of Johns Hopkins Univers-
ity and an expert on Soviet medicine, has estimated that
in the U. S. S. R. the equivalent of $27 out of $30 of med-
ical expenditures goes to prevention as compared with
only $1 out of $30 in America.
The next Article in the Soviet Constitution on the
new rights of man brings us into the field of culture:
"Citizens of the U. S. S. R. have the right to education.
This right is ensured by universal, compulsory, elemen-
tary education; by free seven-year education; by a system
of state stipends to the outstanding students in higher
schools; by instruction in schools being conducted in the
native language, and by the organization in the factories,
state farms, machine and tractor stations and collective
farms of free vocational, technical and agronomic train-
ing for the working people. "
Day nurseries under the Ministry of Public Health
care for infants from thirty-six days old through the age
of three. Kindergartens take children from three to seven.
Neither kindergartens nor nurseries are compulsory.
Both charge working mothers a nominal fee amounting
to one day's pay a month. Only a small proportion of
Soviet mothers take advantage of the creche and kinder-
garten system. Free, universal, compulsory education
extends from the age of seven through thirteen; and the
eventual aim is to make it so for everyone up to eighteen.
Although a capitalist democracy like the United
States does not make any guarantee about education in
its Constitution, it does by law have free, compulsory
76
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
elementary education and a free liberal arts education
or vocational training at the high school and college
levels for those who wish it and can afford to remain
without a paying job. Hence the provisions in the Soviet
Constitution concerning education, while they mark a
signal improvement over Tsarist days, are not excep-
tional. The educational upsurge that has taken place
in the U. S. S. R. since 1917 has not been confined to youth
or based merely on state-run institutions. Serious adult
education has been a pervasive phenomenon and special
educational enterprises have been a regular part of the
activities of labor unions, the Communist Party and the
Soviet army.
In article 122 we come again to a unique constitu-
tional provision: "Women in the U. S. S. R. are accorded
equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state,
cultural, social and political life. The possibility of
exercising these rights is ensured to women by granting
them an equal right with men to work, payment for work,
rest and leisure, social insurance and education, by state
protection of the interests of mother and child, by state
aid to mothers of large families and unmarried mothers,
prematernity and maternity leave with full pay, and the
provision of a wide network of maternity homes, nur-
series and kindergartens. "
Lenin once said that no nation can be free when half
its population, the women, are household slaves and
doomed to "daily sacrifice to a thousand unimportant
trivialities. "4 This statement applies to all countries, but
it had special relevance for Tsarist Russia in which
women were almost universally treated as basically in-
ferior to men. An old Russian proverb stressed the in-
herent inferiority of the female sex: "A hen is no bird,
77
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
and a woman is no human being. " Other Russian say-
ings indicate the harsh treatment that women in Tsarist
days were likely to receive: "Love your wife like your
soul, but thrash her like a pear tree"; "Beat your wife,
the food will be tastier. "
The Soviet Government not only reversed the former
Russian attitude toward women, but went ahead of any
other country in eradicating exploitation of woman by
man and establishing full sex equality in all relevant
ways. This means much more than giving women the
suffrage, a right granted even in the United States and
Great Britain only during the past few decades. Soviet
theory and practice extend equality between the sexes
to the relationship between husband and wife, to eco-
nomic and professional activity, to educational and cul-
tural opportunity, and to participation in every form of
political life.
In the 1937 elections 16. 5 percent of the deputies
chosen for the Supreme Soviet of the U. S. S. R. were
women; in both the 1946 and 1950 elections the per-
centage increased to about 21 as compared with less than
2 percent in the United States Congress for the same years.
Hundreds of women are members of the Supreme Soviets
of the Union and Autonomous Republics. All Soviet
judges and jurors are elected; and in 1949 over 39 percent
of them were women. In 1951 approximately 413,000
women were students in higher educational institutions
and comprised more than 30 percent of the student body.
In the same year more than 40 percent of all persons
employed in the national economy were women. Over
383,000 women were working as engineers and tech-
nicians and over 1,000,000 in the public health system,
including 191,000 qualified physicians and surgeons.
78
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
The Soviet policy does not neglect the biological
function of women as mothers, and indeed extends to
mother and child every possible protection. Sex equality
in Soviet Russia has certainly not led to the break-up of
home life; and there is much evidence that it has brought
increasing stability to the family as an institution. The
system of easy divorces characteristic of the early post-
revolutionary years has given way to a tightening of the
marital bond through making divorces more difficult and
expensive; and to an emphasis on building up a psycho-
logically adjusted and permanent family unit. Grounds
for divorce are desertion, mental disease, the sentencing
of one spouse to three or more years in jail and other
weighty reasons satisfying to the People's Courts. Birth
control techniques are legal, but not encouraged.
In any case we must guard against the fallacy of think-
ing that Soviet sex equality, or any other social-economic
reforms in the U. S. S. R. , can automatically solve the com-
plex problems of sex relations and of women's role in
home management. At the same time we are warranted
in doubting whether the exigencies of the cold war justify
the Soviet Government's policy of refusing to allow Soviet
women married to foreigners to join their husbands
abroad.
The Soviet Constitution takes another epoch-making
step forward in the next Article (123), which ensures
ethnic democracy: "Equality of rights of citizens of the
U. S. S. R. , irrespective of their nationality or race, in all
spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political
life, is an indefeasible law. Any direct or indirect restric-
tion of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of
direct or indirect privileges for, citizens on account of
their race or nationality, as well as any advocacy of racial
79
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIE7 CIVILIZATION
or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is
punishable by law. " The Soviet attitude toward racial
and national minorities within the U. S. S. R. is fraught
with world-wide significance, particularly in view of the
fascist attempt in World War II to foist permanently on
mankind a program of racial prejudice and oppression
and in view of the present distressing minorities situa-
tions in such nations as the United States and South
Africa.
Article 124 concerns the much misunderstood Soviet
attitude toward religion: "In order to ensure to citizens
freedom of conscience, the Church in the U. S. S. R. is
separated from the State, and the school from the Church.
Freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-relig-
ious propaganda is recognized for all citizens. " In the
old Russia the Orthodox Eastern Church was the official
state church and had a controlling voice in the educa-
tional system. A large part of the outcry against the Soviet
Government's treatment of religion has been due precise-
ly to its taking over a principle long established in the
United States, namely, the separation of state and reli-
gion and of school and religion.
A more friendly feeling between government and
church has recently developed in the Soviet Union for
the reason that the Orthodox Church gave such loyal
support in resisting the Nazi invasion. However, it is my
belief that on the whole there has been true freedom
of worship, despite some local excesses against the Church
authorities in the early years, since the Revolution of
1917. There has actually been more religious freedom
than under the Tsars in the sense that the disestablished
Orthodox Church has no longer been able to persecute
minority Protestant, Hebrew and Mohammedan sects;
80
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
and so all religions under the Soviets have legally stood
on a plane of equality. In a later chapter I shall go into
the details of the status of religion in Soviet Russia. *
The next few Articles cover the controversial topic of
civil liberties in the Soviet Union. Article 125 states:
"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 prerequisites for the exercise of these
rights. " Article 127 guarantees the "inviolability of the
person.
No person may be placed under arrest except by
decision of a court or with the sanction of a procurator. "
Article 128 reads: "The inviolability of the homes of
citizens and privacy of correspondence are protected by
law. "
The opening statement on civil liberties obviously
qualifies freedom of opinion by the clause "in order to
strengthen the socialist system. " This definitely implies
that those who are opposed to socialism in Soviet Russia
are not granted the right to express their opposition. In-
dividuals in favor of the restoration of Tsarism or the
capitalist system would quickly get into hot water if they
attempted to express their views. Soviet practice up to
date has gone further and has denied freedom of opinion
to citizens who, even while agreeing that socialism is the
goal, continue to take issue, after a policy decision has
? See p. 121.
81
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
been made, with basic Communist Party or government
directives.
In his book, The Law of the Soviet State, Andrei Y.
Vishinsky, former Procurator-General (Attorney Gen-
eral) of the U. S. S. R. and since 1949 Minister of Foreign
Affairs, asserted: "In our state, naturally there is and can
be no place for freedom of speech, press and so on for the
foes of socialism. "5 How flagrant a violation of civil
liberties this amounts to becomes clear if we apply the
converse of the principle expressed to the capitalist
United States. Then we would have: "Under the Bill
of Rights, naturally there can be no place for freedom
of speech, press, assembly and political organization for
the enemies of capitalism. "
Nevertheless, Soviet citizens retain a wide area for
the operation of free speech in the determination of
policy, up to the point when a final decision is taken, and
in criticism of the way in which policy is carried out.
Soviet workers have been outspoken in their slashing
criticism of economic affairs, factory officials and govern-
ment bureaucrats. This constant self-criticism in the
Soviet Union has become a well-established institution
and provides hostile foreign writers with a great deal of
ammunition for exposing bureaucracy, inefficiencies and
other defects in the Soviet system. We can express the
situation in this manner: Within a limited yet fairly broad
circle of controversial subjects Soviet citizens have full
latitude of speech, but when they go outside that circle
to question settled government policies or fundamental
Marxist principles, their freedom of speech is drastically
curtailed.
The second part of Article 125 underlines once more
the stress that the Soviets put on the economic implemen-
82
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
tation of civil liberties. What use is freedom of the press
unless printing presses and stocks of paper are available?
What good are constitutional guarantees for freedom of
opinion unless the people have "the material requisites
for the exercise of these rights"? Soviet political scientists
make the claim that in the capitalist countries the work-
ers, especially, do not possess these material requisites
because they lack in general the financial means to hire
printing presses, print newspapers and magazines, rent
meeting halls and buy radio time. Capitalist democracies,
Soviet critics go on to say, talk a lot about the abstract
forms of civil liberty, but do not give those forms sub-
stance in economic realities.
The Communists also argue that in capitalist coun-
tries, although governmental authorities crack down only
too often on freedom of speech, the main incidence of
censorship comes from pressures by private businessmen
and corporations that own and operate at least 95 percent
of the press, the radio, the movies and book publishing.
These prime mediums of communication are slanted
overwhelmingly on the capitalist side of every fundamen-
tal issue and need no government prompting to carry on
a constant campaign against socialist and Communist
doctrines. What this amounts to, the argument concludes,
is that under capitalism there is a pervasive private and
voluntary censorship of ideas which is less honest yet just
as effective as the open government censorship in the
Soviet Union.
The remaining articles in Chapter X are primarily
concerned with the duties of Soviet citizens, such as ob-
servance of the laws, maintaining labor discipline and
taking part in universal military service. Article 131 is
particularly worth quoting: "It is the duty of every
83
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
citizen of the U. S. S. R. to safeguard and strengthen public,
socialist property as the sacred and inviolable foundation
of the Soviet system, as the source of the wealth and
might of the country, as the source of the prosperous and
cultured life of all the working people. Persons commit-
ting offenses against public, socialist property are enemies
of the people. "
The new rights of man guaranteed in the Soviet
Constitution show more clearly than any other section
of that document the ideals toward which Soviet social-
ism is driving. Some of those ideals have already been
largely fulfilled. It is no small thing for the Soviet Re-
public to have abolished unemployment and depression,
to have provided social insurance and free medical care
for all, and to have established racial, economic and
educational democracy as well as equality between the
sexes. It is the challenge of such achievements which, as
Edward H. Carr, a British professor of international poli-
tics, shows in his illuminating book, The Soviet Impact
on the Western World, has led to much salutary social
and economic legislation in the West during the past
two decades. These accomplishments of the U. S. S. R. are
either slighted or not mentioned at all in the great hue
and cry which anti-Soviet forces are continually stirring
up.
Naturally those hostile to Soviet Russia concentrate
on its salient weaknesses, such as the state of civil lib-
erties and of political democracy. Any impartial ob-
server of the Soviet scene must admit that the Socialist
Republic limps and lags in these two significant criteria
of a civilized nation. Despotic practices inherited from
Tsardom, the historical Russian pattern of exalting the
community above individual rights, the long tradition --
84
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
fostered by the Orthodox Church -- of the principle of
unanimous agreement on important issues, the domestic
turbulence and hatreds resulting from the greatest revo-
lution in history, the fear and actuality of foreign ag-
gression, and the Marxist theory of proletarian dictator-
ship have all combined to hold back the evolution of
civil liberties and political democracy in the Soviet
Union.
Many people in the Western democracies thought
that the famous Moscow Trials of 1936-38, in which a
number of prominent Communist leaders were convicted
of treason, were a ghastly travesty on due process of law
and were complete frame-ups. I myself, after reading
carefully the voluminous verbatim testimony in the three
big trials -- something which few critics of Soviet justice
have bothered to do -- became convinced that the defend-
ants' sweeping confessions were genuine and that they
were indeed guilty of conspiring with Leon Trotsky and
outright fascist agents to overthrow the Soviet Govern-
ment. Since Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and the others
firmly believed that Stalin had betrayed socialism both
at home and abroad, they felt justified as revolutionaries
in adopting any methods whatever to get rid of his re-
gime.
At the same time, when fascist plotting under the
direction of Hitler and Mussolini was making such head-
way throughout the European continent, it was too much
to expect that Soviet Russia had become so stable that
there could be no fifth column within it. Actually, many
of those who denounced the Moscow Trials naively
assumed that political progress had been so rapid in the
Soviet Union that it was simply impossible for a con-
spiracy linked with the Fascist-Nazi Axis to find root
85
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
there. During this trying period miscarriages of justice
occurred, in my judgment, not in the Moscow Trials, but
in the general purges that accompanied them throughout
the country and in which many innocent persons suffered.
Furthermore, the feeling against Trotsky was so extreme
that the Soviet authorities not only condemned him as
a traitor -- which he was -- but took the lamentable and
ludicrous step of re-writing history in an endeavor to
erase from the records all accounts of the leading role
he played in the 1917 Revolution and in the defense of
the Socialist Republic during its initial stages.
In his memoirs of the pre-war years Winston
Churchill makes a most significant comment on the Mos-
cow Trials. He relates that while President Benes of
Czechoslovakia was bickering with Hitler in the fall of
1936, "he became aware that communications were pass-
ing through the Soviet Embassy in Prague between im-
portant personages in Russia and the German Govern-
ment. This was part of the so-called Old-Guard Com-
munist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin, and introduce a
new regime based on a pro-German policy. President
Benes lost no time in communicating all he could find
out to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless,
but perhaps not needless, military and political purge
in Soviet Russia and the series of trials in January, 1937,
in which Vishinsky, the Public Prosecutor, played so
masterful a part. "6
To see the Soviet picture clearly we must also recog-
nize that history shows that far-reaching revolutions have
usually given rise to the most unscrupulous conduct and
to bitter, throat-cutting dissension among the revolu-
tionaries themselves. Sidney and Beatrice Webb give
us the historical perspective: "Even England and Scot-
86
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOX
land, in the small population of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, with a much less fundamental revo-
lution, produced generation after generation of conspira-
tors, to whom treason and killing, with lies and deceit,
were only part of what they felt to be a righteous ef-
fort. . . .
"The French Revolution of 1789-95 ushered in a
similar period of conspiracy and struggle, leading to a
whole succession of counter-revolutions, not reaching the
stability of a democratic republic, with its large measure
of personal security and social equality, for nearly a
century. . . . In Russia [which was in 1900 in the matter
of morals and civilization very much where Britain and
France stood in 1700] the pattern of behavior of the
revolutionary conspirators culminated in a bitterness
and mutual antagonism more acute and all-pervading
than in any other example. "7
Especially since the end of World War II reckless
charges have been made that the Soviet Union is a hor-
rible slave state keeping from ten to twenty million
people at forced labor in concentration camps situated
in Siberia and other places. While there is no question
that the Soviet authorities have isolated political prisoners
and ordinary criminals in special work camps, the num-
bers involved have steadily declined in recent years and
have at no time reached the huge totals conjured up in
the lurid imaginations of anti-Soviet propagandists.
The Soviet Government has from its earliest years
prided itself on its method of retraining and rehabilitat-
ing prisoners of whatever variety for a normal life in the
community by giving them useful work to do while im-
prisoned. One of the chief aims of this procedure is to
ensure a good job for the prisoner when he is finally re-
87
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
leased and to make certain that society does not perma-
nently boycott him for his original offense. Prior to the
Second World War penologists from foreign countries
had frequently praised this Soviet system of curative
work as highly intelligent and effective. Now, with
malice aforethought, the same thing is stigmatized as
"slave labor" as part of an endeavor to indict the total-
ity of Soviet civilization.
These remarks are not intended to negate the fact
that the administration of justice in the Soviet Union
has been biased and harsh towards those considered
enemies of the socialist state; that the Soviet authorities,
relying on an omnipresent secret police, have jailed tens
of thousands of blameless individuals in their periodic
purges; and that Soviet prisons and labor camps have
frequently failed to maintain decent and healthy condi-
tions. In a country where general standards of living have
remained comparatively low, the life of political and
other prisoners is likely to be on a correspondingly low
plane. We can accept as true many of the bitter experi-
ences related by escaped Soviet prisoners without gener-
alizing their reports into a condemnation of the entire
Soviet system of penology.
In 1949 the Soviet Government expelled an American
writer, Miss Anna Louise Strong, as a foreign agent and
a spy without giving her a proper opportunity for legal
defense or even explaining what precisely were the
charges against her. I am glad to say that later, during
1950, my wife and I organized a group of American writ-
ers and intellectuals who sent a vigorous letter on the
Strong case to Mr. Alexander S. Panyushkin, Soviet Am-
bassador to the United States from 1947 to 1952. This
communication urged the Soviet Government "to review
88
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE SOVIET COHSTITUTIOH
carefully the case of Anna Louise Strong and to see
whether some mistake was not made regarding her by
the Soviet Security police or other officials in immediate
charge. "8 Nothing ever came of this protest.
Persons like myself, who believe firmly in the Western
ideals of individual liberty and the toleration of dissent,
often as these ideals have been thwarted or betrayed in
the West, have the obligation to continue our criticism of
Soviet institutions insofar as they do not measure up
to true democratic standards.
It would be possible to write a book of considerable
length concerning the violation of civil liberties and
political democracy in Soviet Russia. In fact author
after author has done this very thing, as if the repressive
aspects of the Soviet dictatorship were the complete story
about the U. S. S. R. Yet despite all the legitimate quali-
fications about Soviet political life, the Soviet Consti-
tution itself clearly belongs on the positive side of the
ledger. It is a document that does great credit to its
framers and that presents a grand design of human living
of which the Soviet people can well be proud.
89
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? CHAPTER III SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
1. Soviet National and Racial Minorities
Take the map of the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub-
lics and identify, each with a distinct color, the homeland
of each of the 577 Soviet races, nationalities or tribesT
and you will have an incomparable crazy-quilt of gay
and gaudy hue. For within the sprawling boundaries of
the U. S. S. R. and amongst its population of 210,000,000
there are scattered a greater number of different ethnic
groups, both large and small, maintaining their separate
territories and cultures, than in any other country on
earth. (They speak over 125 different languages and dia-
lects and practice as many as forty different religions! /
Most people outside the Soviet Union still refer to
that country as "Russia. " This is incorrect, since the
Russian Republic is only one of the sixteen main repub-
lics of the U. S. S. R. and the Russians themselves come to
only a little more than half of the total Soviet popula-
tion. A prime reason for Lenin and his associates choos-
ing the official title, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
for the new state was to try to make sure that none of the
minority races and nationalities of the former Russian
Empire would feel subordinate, as in pre-revolutionary
days, to the large Russian majority. The idea implied
in the very name was that all the racial and national
90
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:29 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015020686591 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? SOVIET ETHNIC DEMOCRACY
groups in the confederation would stand on a plane of
freedom and equality.
The Soviet policy toward minorities goes back to the
earliest period of the 1917 Revolution. On November
15, nine days after it came into power, the Soviet Gov-
ernment issued, under the signatures of Lenin as Premier
and Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, a revolutionary
document entitled, \HThe Declaration of the Rights of
the Peoples of Russia. " This emancipation proclama-
tion for ethnic minorities, unique in the annals of state-
craft up to that time, pledged the Communist regime
to support the following four basic principles: (1) "The
equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia; (2) the
right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination,
even to the extent of separation and the formation of
independent states; (3) the abolition of all national and
national-religious privileges and restrictions; and (4) the
free development of the national minorities and ethnic
groups inhabiting Russia. "1"!
Before many weeks had passed the Soviet Govern-
ment made another significant pronouncement directed
to the Moslem peoples of the former Tsarist Empire.
"Moslems of Russia," it began, "Tatars of the Volga and
Crimea, Kirgiz and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks
and Tatars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and Mountain-
eers of the Caucasus -- all those whose mosques and
chapels have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs
have been trampled under foot by the Tsars and oppres-
sors of Russia! Henceforth your beliefs and customs,
your national and cultural institutions are free and in-
violable. Build your national life free and unhindered.
You have a right to do so. Know that your rights, as well
as the rights of all peoples of Russia, are protected by the
91
? ?
