Three men edited this book. Vladimir Kudryavtsev was a criminologist who had directed the Institute of State and Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences since 1973 and would become 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 Mikhail Gorbachev, and one of the more genuine reformers among them. Anatoly Lukyanov had worked on drafting the very Constitution this dictionary explains, in 1975–77, and on 15 March 1990 he became Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR; he was arrested on 29 August 1991 for his part in the attempt to save the state by force. The volume was compiled by B. N. Topornin of the same Institute, with some two dozen other jurists — T. Ye. Abova, V. G. Boyarshinov, Yu. V. Dolgopolov, N. P. Farberov, M. G. Galkin, O. Ye. Kutafin, B. N. Lazarev, V. A. Maslennikov, G. S. Ostroumov, A. S. Pavlov, R. A. Safarov, N. G. Salishcheva, I. S. Samoshchenko, M. A. Shafir, A. I. Shchglik, Ye. K. Smirnitsky, V. K. Sobakin, L. A. Steshenko, B. A. Strashun, N. V. Vitruk and N. A. Zolotarev.
That is not an apparatus hack-list. It is close to the whole senior faculty of Soviet constitutional law, and the book they produced is a competent, sober, professionally drafted piece of legal exposition. It is also the last full statement of the constitutional order of the Soviet Union before that order was dismantled, in part by the people who wrote it.
The date on the spine is the real one. This series has been burned in both directions by Progress imprints — translations of texts years older, reprints wearing new jackets — so it is worth saying plainly what the internal evidence shows. The book cites the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU by name and reports that "In 1986, 'the 27th Congress of the CPSU approved the new edition of the Party Programme"; that congress sat from 25 February to 6 March 1986. Years as late as 1990 appear eight times, and every one of them is the horizon of the twelfth five-year plan — "the Guidelines for the Economic and Social Development of the USSR for 1986–1990 and for the Period Ending in 2000", adopted by that same congress. There is no OCR corruption and no backdating: this is a book finished in the spring or summer of 1986, in Gorbachev's second year.
Which makes the silences in it a matter of weeks rather than decades. The words perestroika, glasnost, democratisation and Chernobyl do not occur. Gorbachev is not named — nor is Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Andropov or Chernenko. Neither is Stalin: the string appears once in the entire book, inside "the medal For the Defence of Stalingrad". Trotsky is absent, as is Bukharin. The most conspicuous near-miss is the headword Publicity — glasnost, translated as the 1977 Constitution translates it — which turns out to mean only what Article 9 had meant since 1977: "informing the population through the mass media and other means of information about the establishment and activity of government and nongovernment bodies". The word was already in the constitutional text. What Gorbachev was in the process of doing to it has not reached this book. Read it as the last photograph taken before the exposure changed.
Now the method, which the companion volume in this series, A Dictionary of Scientific Communism (1984), sets out: a reference work argues by assignment. It decides what is a thing. So count. There are 177 headwords, of which 32 are bare cross-references, leaving 145 substantive entries across roughly 95,000 words. As in the companion volume there are no biographical entries, no persons among the headwords at all. But test something sharper. Go to the letter F, where a dictionary of a constitution might be expected to earn its keep. The entries are: Flag, National; Foreign Nationals; Foreign Policy; Forfeiting Citizenship of the USSR; Fundamentals of Legislation of the USSR and Union Republics. There is no entry for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of demonstration or freedom of conscience. There is no entry for secession, for emigration, for censorship, for the press. Every political liberty in the Constitution has been folded into a single entry — "Basic Rights and Freedoms of Citizens", at 3,946 words the longest in the book — where it can be handled in context.
Read that entry and you see why. The exposition of the social and economic rights is expansive, statistical and, on the whole, true. The political freedoms get three paragraphs, and here is the second of them in full:
The Constitution of the USSR guarantees freedom and equality, including political freedoms, not for some particular section of the population but for the whole of the Soviet people, including all classes and social strata. Citizens' rights and freedoms must not, however, be used against the socialist system or the socialist state. Slander of the socialist system, anti-Soviet propaganda or agitation are prohibited bylaw.
That is the whole of it. Article 50's own qualifying clause — the freedoms may be exercised "in accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system" — is printed a few lines earlier without a word of comment, as though a right conditional on the approval of the body it might be exercised against were a right at all. And the sentence about slander and agitation names no statute, no article, no court and no case. The instruments were Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code and its 1966 supplement Article 190-1, under which several thousand people were tried; a dictionary of the Constitution written by the country's leading criminologist could have cited them in a clause. Instead the reader is told the prohibition exists and then immediately redirected: "Western ideologists interpret political freedoms in an abstract manner, trying to conceal their real class content." The next sentence but one asserts that the Soviet freedoms, "unlike bourgeois practice", "are not purely declarative".
The book is more forthcoming when it is not on the defensive, and that is where it gives itself away. Betrayal of the Motherland does have its own headword — treason merits an entry where speech does not — and the entry is unembarrassed:
B.M. (high treason) is premeditated act committed by a citizen of the USSR to the detriment of state independence, the territorial integrity or the military might of the Soviet state by going over to the side of the enemy, engaging in espionage, divulging an official or military secret to another state, escaping abroad or refusing to return to the USSR from abroad, rendering assistance to a foreign state in carrying out hostile activities against the USSR, or conspiring to seize state power.
The penalty, the entry adds, is "deprivation of liberty for a term of from 10 to 15 years, or by the death penalty", and failure to report a treason "under preparation" is itself criminal. There is no entry for emigration anywhere in the book. So the reader learns what leaving is: it is treason, on a scale with espionage, and it can be capital. The entry then produces one of the most instructive sentences in the volume — "No objective conditions exist for the commitment of crimes of this kind in the Soviet state of the whole people" — and in the very next sentence explains that they are committed anyway, by "individual renegades and morally unstable persons". A theory in which the phenomenon cannot exist, followed by an account of who does it: this is the characteristic move of the whole book, and it recurs wherever social reality has to be met.
The same flatness is worth crediting where it cuts the other way. Punishment for Criminal Offence lists the basic penalties without euphemism — "deprivation of liberty; exile; restricted residence; corrective labour without deprivation of liberty" — and notes that "Application of the death penalty is an exceptional measure of punishment." A Western reader in 1986 could learn from this book that internal exile and restriction of residence were ordinary sentences of Soviet law, which is more than the propaganda volumes in this series would have told them.
Now the deepest hole. Union Republic states that a republic "retains the right freely to secede from the USSR"; the entries on the 1924 and 1936 Constitutions each say the same. Three assertions, no headword, and — this is the point — no procedure. Nowhere in ninety-five thousand words of constitutional exposition is there a sentence about how a republic would exercise that right: which body would initiate it, by what majority, on what timetable, subject to what conditions. Every other constitutional mechanism in the book, down to the two-and-a-half-year terms of people's assessors and the fifteen-day limit on answering a citizen's complaint, is set out in procedural detail. Article 72 alone floats free. When the Baltic republics tested it in 1989–90 the Union had to legislate a secession law from nothing, in a hurry, and it was designed to be unusable. The blank space in this dictionary is where that crisis was already sitting.
There was, of course, a procedure of a kind, and it had been named in print nine years earlier. Reporting the treason charge against Anatoly Shcharansky, Marilyn Vogt observed in Intercontinental Press that "While the right of a republic to secede from the USSR is guaranteed by Article 17 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution, Article 64 of the Stalinists' Criminal Code makes attempts to agitate for such secession punishable by death" (vol. 15 no. 22, June 1977). Article 64 is the treason article — and the dictionary's own entry on Betrayal of the Motherland is a faithful summary of it, down to the flight abroad and the death penalty. The two halves of the mechanism are both in this book. They are simply nine hundred words and one letter of the alphabet apart, and no cross-reference joins them.
The article that did more work than any other gets 2,175 words, the third-longest entry: Communist Party of the Soviet Union, opening with Article 6. It is the most doctrinally confident thing in the volume, and it contains a claim that deserves preserving: "the Party, its organisations and all Communists have no privileges of any kind, or advantages compared to other mass organisations or individual citizens." On 14 March 1990 the Third Congress of People's Deputies struck the leading role out of Article 6 by 1,956 votes to 276. The following day it elected Anatoly Lukyanov — this book's co-editor — Chairman of the Supreme Soviet.
State Security is the entry on the KGB, and it is written as institutional genealogy: the Committee for State Security is placed in direct descent from the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission set up in December 1917 under Felix Dzerzhinsky, which "waged an unrelenting struggle against internal and international counter-revolution, exposed numerous conspiracies against the USSR and prosecuted its enemies". Lenin is quoted for the necessity of such an institution. Between 1917 and "at present" there is nothing — no NKVD, no 1937, no Beria, no rehabilitation. The line of descent is claimed and the fifty years in the middle are simply not there.
Which brings us to the entry on the Constitution of the USSR of 1936, 972 words, and to the one falsification in this book that is a matter of dates rather than emphasis. The entry narrates the drafting with care: the Seventh Congress of Soviets resolved on changes in 1935; a Constitutional Commission was established; "On June 12, 1936, after the Commission had finalised its draft, it was published for nationwide discussion, in which over 50 per cent of the country's adult population participated and about two million additions and amendments were proposed"; it was "adopted by the Extraordinary Eighth Congress of Soviets of the USSR on December 5, 1936"; and then, in the last substantive sentence, "Between January and March, 1937, the constitutional legislation in all the Union and Autonomous republics was updated."
Set the calendar beside it. The draft was published on 12 June 1936. On 19 August the trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen others opened in Moscow; all sixteen were shot on 25 August, in the middle of the "nationwide discussion". The Constitution was adopted on 5 December. In January 1937 Pyatakov and Radek were tried; at the Central Committee plenum of February–March 1937 — precisely the window in which the republican legislation was being tidied up — Bukharin and Rykov were arrested and the mass operations were authorised. The dictionary's chronology is accurate to the day and describes a country that did not exist. It does not lie about the dates; it lies by giving them.
Nor is the document ever called what everyone called it. The 1936 Constitution was the Stalin Constitution, drafted under his chairmanship. His name does not appear. The result is a text that manages to narrate the single most notorious constitutional episode of the twentieth century without an author, without a victim and without a year that means anything.
One more silence, quieter and quite deliberate. Autonomous Republic lists all twenty ASSRs then in existence, and the alphabetical roll of the sixteen inside the RSFSR runs "Bashkir, Buryat, Daghestan, Kabardin-Balkar, Kalmyk, Karelian, Komi, Mari, Mordovian, North Ossetian, Tatar, Tuva, Udmurt, Chechen-Ingush, Chuvash, and Yakut". The Kalmyk and the Chechen-Ingush republics were abolished in 1943–44 and their entire populations deported to Central Asia and Siberia; both were restored, incompletely, after 1957. The Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans, whose republics were not restored, appear nowhere in the book at all. A dictionary organised around the constitutional equality of nations lists the survivors and does not mention that the list once had other names on it.
It would be dishonest to leave it there, because the other half of this Constitution was real and the dictionary documents it well. The right to work meant guaranteed employment, and the entry is right that "Unemployment was stamped out in the USSR in 1930 and the country has enjoyed full employment ever since." Free medical care at 41.2 physicians per 10,000 population in 1984, one of the highest ratios in the world; a housing programme under which, the book claims, 28,000 people a day improved their conditions and roughly 80 per cent of urban dwellers had separate apartments by 1985; universal compulsory secondary education and free higher education with maintenance grants; pensionable ages of 55 and 60, among the lowest anywhere. These were not fictions. They were delivered, at a level no comparable economy matched, and any account of the Soviet Union that cannot say so is not worth reading. The procedural entries are also genuinely useful: Complaint, Amnesty, Courts, Legal Procedure and Punishment for Criminal Offence are clear, specific descriptions of how Soviet law actually operated, and there is no comparably compact account in English. The critique is not that this book invents the social rights. It is that the political articles were qualified into nullity by clauses which the dictionary prints, in its own voice, without noticing that it is printing them.
The reply was written fifty years before this book, by a man who had read the previous Constitution the same way. In April 1936, before the draft was even published, Trotsky argued in Biulleten' Oppozitsii that the reform's purpose was to abolish the soviets as class organs and to dissolve the workers "into the general mass of the population", and that a state which had abolished classes yet retained the GPU had refuted itself: "The classes have been destroyed, the soviets are being abolished, the class theory of society is reduced to dust, but the bureaucracy remains. Q.E.D." Later that year, in chapter 10 of The Revolution Betrayed, "The Soviet Union in the Mirror of the New Constitution", he turned to the guarantees themselves:
To be sure, the new charter "guarantees" to the citizens the so-called "freedoms" of speech, press, assemblage and street processions. But each of these guarantees has the form either of a heavy muzzle or of shackles upon the hands and feet.
He was writing about the muzzle from outside it. The present volume, in 1986, prints the muzzle in the ordinary descriptive prose of a reference book, under no compulsion to mention that it is one.
The same reading was applied to the 1977 Constitution while its draft was still in circulation. Gerry Foley, reviewing it in Intercontinental Press under the title "Brezhnev's New Constitution" (vol. 15 no. 23, June 1977), fastened on the identical hinge that this dictionary steps over: draft Article 39, "The exercise of rights and freedoms by citizens must not damage the interests of the society and the state." Foley's gloss was one sentence — "That is, rights can only be used for what the rulers of the society consider positive purposes" — and it is the sentence this book was written to make unnecessary. He also noted what the dictionary presents as the Constitution's crowning achievement and Foley took as its confession: that Article 6 wrote the fusion of party and state into the fundamental law, where "even [Stalin] did not dare refer to it openly in his constitution." Whatever one thinks of the politics, the prediction held. Trotsky's underlying test is worth restating because this dictionary fails it on its own chosen ground. The Party programme of 1919 had held that "deprivation of political rights, and all other limitations of freedom whatsoever, are necessary exclusively in the form of temporary measures", to lapse as exploitation disappeared. This book announces that exploitation disappeared long ago, that the dictatorship of the proletariat has given way to a "socialist state of the whole people" of which it says that "The social base of the S.S.W.P. is represented by the whole of society" — and it retains, in the same volume, treason charges for leaving the country, criminal liability for anti-Soviet agitation, exile and restricted residence among ordinary penalties, and a security service in unbroken descent from the Cheka. On the doctrine's own terms those things should have withered. The dictionary never asks why they did not, because the entry that would have had to ask — an entry on bureaucracy — is one of the ones that does not exist.
That is finally what a reader should take from this book. It is not a tissue of lies; it is an honest inventory of an order that had stopped being able to describe itself. Within five years of its publication the leading role of the Party had been struck out of the Constitution it explains, Article 72 had been used for the purpose the book declined to specify, and one of its three editors was in Lefortovo. Nobody who wrote it can have expected that. It is worth reading precisely because they did not.