Soviet officials worked to orchestrate the public discussions, but some people seized the moment. Collective farmers expressed hatred of the in-kind system of remuneration according to days worked and demanded to be paid in cash, like urban workers. One proposed that instead of the slogan “He who does not work does not eat,” they substitute “He who works should eat.”254 A student at a medical school in Zaporozhie (Ukraine) was reported to have said, “In the USSR we have no democracy and will not have it; everything is done and will be done as Stalin dictates. We will be given neither freedom of the press nor freedom of speech.” After his arrest, some fellow students tried to pass a letter to him in prison praising his courage.255 The constitution’s article on freedom of religion sparked petitions from Orthodox believers to reopen churches. Wishful misunderstandings abounded: that the constitution was reintroducing private property, that kulaks would be allowed to return to their villages, that farmers would “live as before,” that Stalin might abolish the party, because he could not trust it, and institute presidential rule, which would provoke even more political terror (along the lines of Kirov’s murder).256
The draft text omitted the category “the proletariat” in favor of “the people,” which Trotsky disparaged as additional evidence of a retreat from socialism and consolidation of a new ruling class of functionaries (concealed in the term “intelligentsia”).257 “In a private conversation Stalin admitted that we did not have a dictatorship of the proletariat,” Molotov would later recall. “He told me that personally, but not firmly.” 258 Stalin’s Eighth Congress speech was categorical, however. “In 1917, the peoples of the USSR overthrew the bourgeoisie and established a dictatorship of the proletariat, established Soviet power,” he explained. “That is a fact, not a promise. Then the Soviet government eliminated the landlord class and transferred more than 150 million hectares of former landlord, state, and monastery lands to the peasants, and that was in addition to those lands already in peasant hands. That is a fact, not a promise. Then the Soviet government expropriated the capitalist class, took away their banks, factories, railroads, and other means of production, declared them socialist property, and put at the head of these enterprises the best members of the working class. That is a fact, not a promise.” He added that industrialization and collectivization further transformed the social structure, giving the USSR two nonantagonistic classes (workers and peasants) and one stratum (the intelligentsia). This was the first fully authoritative analysis of Soviet society in class terms.
The constitution aspired to reinforce socialist legality—rule by law—a triumph for USSR procurator general Vyshinsky. It also further centralized the state machinery (this was largely omitted in public discussions). Successive drafts had stipulated that the USSR government would exercise jurisdiction over land, water, and natural resources, while decisions of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars would be binding on the republics. The constitution replaced the periodic Congress of Soviets with a permanent USSR Supreme Soviet, to which all republic laws were to be subordinated. (Criminal codes remained the prerogative of republics.) Physically, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic was significantly shrunk as two of its autonomous ethnic republics became full-fledged Union republics—Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan—while a third (Karakalpak) was transferred to the Uzbek republic. This brought the number of Central Asian Union republics to five. Also, the South Caucasus Federation was dissolved in favor of the self-standing republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, bringing the total number of Union republics to eleven. For the first time, a Soviet constitution also enshrined the Communist party as “the vanguard of the working people in their struggle to strengthen and develop the socialist system,” and as “the leading core of all organizations of the working people, both public and state.” This appeared not in the section on the state but the one on “public organizations.”