The Soviet Constitution A Dictionary

The last full statement of the constitutional order of the Soviet Union, written in part by the people who would later dismantle it.

Three men edited it. Vladimir Kudryavtsev had directed the Institute of State and Law since 1973 and became a vice-president of the Academy in 1988. Georgy Shakhnazarov was president of the Soviet Association of Political Sciences and was about to become one of the half-dozen advisers closest to Gorbachev, and among the more genuine reformers of them. Anatoly Lukyanov had worked on drafting the very Constitution the dictionary explains; in March 1990 he became Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and in August 1991 he was arrested for his part in the attempt to save the state by force.

It was compiled by B. N. Topornin with some two dozen other jurists, and that roster is close to the whole senior faculty of Soviet constitutional law. What they produced is a competent, sober, professionally drafted piece of legal exposition - the terms of the 1977 Constitution defined one by one, from the organs of state power and the federal structure to citizens' rights and duties, the courts, the procuracy and the electoral system.

For once the spine is the real date, and the book knows its moment: it cites the Twenty-Seventh Congress of February and March 1986 by name and works to the horizon of the twelfth five-year plan.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.