Stalin: A Biography полностью

Stalin’s own activity was still ambiguous. In 1935–6 he oversaw the elaboration of a new USSR Constitution. He involved many leading figures in politics and culture in the work; even Bukharin at his editorial offices in Izvestiya contributed to the early variants.³⁵ Ultimate authority, however, stayed with Stalin and the Politburo. In practice this meant Stalin. And Stalin, the relentless persecutor of ex-oppositionists and the so-called ‘former people’, sanctioned the granting of full civic rights under the Constitution to all Soviet citizens regardless of their social, religious or political backgrounds. Universal equality of treatment was proclaimed. Soviet citizens were guaranteed pay, food, education, shelter and employment. No other constitution in the world was so expansive in the benefits it proffered. At a time when all his political manoeuvres were at their most opaque Stalin presented a baffling persona to observers in 1936. The Constitution was so comprehensively benign in most of its clauses that some thought he was engaged in subterfuge. Perhaps it was designed mainly for gullible foreign eyes in the interests of the USSR’s international relations. Possibly he also intended it as propaganda at home without seriously intending to realise its contents in the foreseeable future. Stalin had a long record of disguising oppression and exploitation in the Soviet Union and claiming the country as a paradise for most of its citizens.

Introducing the Constitution in November 1936, Stalin proclaimed: ‘Socialism, which is the first phase of communism, has basically been achieved in our country.’ Breaking with his earlier idea that resistance to communism grew fiercer as the accomplishments of the regime mounted, he welcomed the revocation of the 1918 disfranchisement of the old political, economic, social and religious elites. But he brooked no challenge to the orientation of the Politburo. The Constitution defined the USSR as ‘a socialist state of the workers and peasants’. Despite their constitutional rights, citizens would not be permitted to overturn the Soviet order. Stalin, glossing various clauses, openly stated that there would be no weakening of the communist dictatorship.

Some citizens, however, failed to understand the practical limits to the Constitution’s realisability. Complaints and denunciations were sent to the Kremlin on the assumption that the authorities had a genuine commitment to comprehensive civic rights.³⁶ Of course most people saw through the illusion. The according of full civil rights to ‘former people’ meant that they at best gained the rights of the oppressed remainder of Soviet citizens — and there was no official intention to reform this basic situation. The USSR was ruled arbitrarily and with massive repression. Most people expected little from the new Constitution. At a funeral meeting someone shouted: ‘One dog — Kirov — has been killed. That still leaves another dog, Stalin, alive.’³⁷ Resentment was dire in the country-side.³⁸ Few citizens expected much advantage to accrue to them from the Constitution. Although the communist party was not mentioned in any of its clauses, the party’s political monopoly was plainly going to be maintained so long as Stalin remained in power. The electoral system was as much a fiction as its Soviet predecessor. The NKVD laid its reports on Stalin’s desk. Whatever he had been planning by means of the Constitution, he was left in no doubt that he had not fooled most people. Everyone knew that the party and police intended to exercise as fierce a dictatorship as before.

Other events in the second half of 1936 signalled that Stalin was far from content with political conditions. His measures, always brutal, were descending to the depths of depravity. On 29 June 1936 a secret message went from the Secretariat to local party bodies alleging the discovery of the ‘terrorist activities of the Trotyskist–Zinovievite block’. Evidently the judicial sentences in the previous year had not satisfied Stalin, and Zinoviev and Kamenev were arraigned in August in a Moscow show trial. They duly confessed to having led, in concert with Trotski abroad, an Anti-Soviet Trotskyist–Zinovievite Centre which systematically carried out assassinations in the USSR. Budënny idiotically suggested getting the Comintern to capture Trotski and ship him back for trial with the two main defendants.³⁹ Zinoviev and Kamenev were already broken men before their miserable appearance in court. At Stalin’s behest they were subjected to continual revilement and mockery throughout the proceedings. The verdict was execution by shooting. Zinoviev and Kamenev had been told that, if they confessed to involvement in the Kirov ‘conspiracy’ in 1934, their sentences would be commuted. But Stalin had tricked them. Early next morning, before any judicial appeal could be considered, they were hauled out of their cells and shot.