Nonstop Performance

The whole Soviet Union had a holiday last week to celebrate the tenth anniversary of "the only thoroughly democratic constitution in the world." All papers carried huge pictures of Stalin; the document's seven other top founding fathers went unmentioned.* "Our greatest happiness," explained Izvestia, "is being able to live under the sun of the Stalin Constitution, each article of which is sacred for us."

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the constitution was finally reduced to one article: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." The Stalin Constitution still has its 146 articles, but some are more sacred than others. The three most sacred are Article 2 (dictatorship of the proletariat). Article 126 (making the Communist Party "the leading nucleus of all organizations . . . both public and state"), and Article 141 (candidates for public office can be nominated only by the Communist Party and organizations which, to all intents & purposes, it controls). Many of the other 143 are relatively democratic in the Western sense. But Russians wryly say: "Lozhka dyegtya v bochke myeda" (A spoonful of tar spoils a barrel of honey).

Every country's formal constitution differs from the way the government really works. Russia has the greatest gap of all. Its constitution promises "freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly"--and ignores all three except for carefully selected "Soviet selfcriticism" that promotes Party goals. It provides universal suffrage, but voters can merely endorse one hand-picked slate. Soviet citizens are "guaranteed inviolability of the person," though the secret police arrest anyone they please.

The Supreme Soviet, exercising "exclusively . . . the legislative power of the U.S.S.R," has never yet written any legislation, but is occasionally allowed to ratify decrees which the Government has already issued. Classic instance: when Molotov told the Supreme Soviet in 1939 that Russia had abandoned collective security in favor of a pact with Germany, that body unanimously accepted his report without debate "because of the clarity and consistency of the foreign policy of the Soviet Government."

In the course of the anniversary celebrations, Moscow's short-wave radio gave the rest of the world a thought for the week. It triumphantly pointed out that the British had rejected Churchill, the French Laval and America the party of Roosevelt. In fact it added "there is hardly a bourgeois state where over these ten years a single leading party has remained in power. . . . The constitutions of these states demonstrated their impracticability. Only in the U.S.S.R. is the same one party, the Communist Party, still in power. . . ."

*Petrovsky has been missing since 1938. Chervyakov, Aitakov, Musabekov, Khodzhayev and Rakhimbayev were all purged. Kalinin died last summer (of natural causes).

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