Brezhnev's Rising Sun

"Our greatest happiness is being able to live under the sun of the Stalin constitution, each article of which is sacred for us." So declared Izvestiya three decades ago. Last week there loomed on the horizon of Soviet citizens a new constitution--Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev's proudest creation and the product of 15 years of labor and behind-the-scenes controversy.

Comprising nine sections with 173 articles, the draft of the new constitution, the Soviet Union's fourth, will be discussed in factories, collective farms, offices and schools all over the U.S.S.R. Possibly in a slightly altered form, but without substantive changes, the text will almost certainly be approved by the Supreme Soviet, the nation's rubber-stamp parliament, in time for the 60th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution next November.

One intriguing feature of the new constitution is Article 118, which allows for creation of a First Vice President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. The provision may allow Brezhnev, 70, to take over the presidency without having to assume all the administrative and ceremonial duties carried out by Nikolai Podgorny before his ouster from the Politburo earlier this month (TIME, June 6). The constitution is also the first in Soviet history to assert the primacy of the Communist Party in the political life of the U.S.S.R., although this has long been manifestly the case. This declaration could strengthen Brezhnev's authority over the government bureaucracy.

The Brezhnev constitution is predictably comprehensive in the multiplicity of guarantees it offers of happiness, freedom and material well-being to Soviet citizens. The old constitution also ensured a wide range of freedoms --press, assembly, religion and speech. As it happened, the 1936 constitution was adopted just as Stalin began his Great Purges, which cost 1 million lives, including that of the document's author, Bolshevik Leader Nikolai Bukharin. The new model not only reiterates most of the old guarantees but also promises Soviet citizens the right to have a house, income and savings, livestock and an assortment of "articles of everyday use and personal consumption and convenience." It enlarges freedoms to include the inviolability of correspondence, telephone conversations and telegrams. It also declares that spouses shall be "completely equal in their matrimonial relations."

The new constitution contains a section defining Soviet foreign policy, which it says is in favor of peace and "broad international cooperation." The constitution also proclaims that a "fully developed socialist society has been built in the U.S.S.R.," the nation having graduated from the earlier "dictatorship of the proletariat."

For some Soviet citizens, one proviso of the Brezhnev constitution makes a mockery of the flowery guarantees of individual liberties. It reads: "Exercise by citizens of rights and freedoms must not injure the interests of society and the state, and the rights of other citizens." Obviously, this statement gives legal sanction for the KGB to proceed, without having to manufacture pretexts, against dissidents exercising the right of free speech, assembly or religion.

Russia's leading dissident, Physicist Andrei Sakharov, last week called upon the Kremlin to grant amnesty to political prisoners, as a good-will gesture connected with the Brezhnev-constitution celebrations. Any such amnesty seems unlikely. Instead, Soviet authorities have stepped up their persecution of human rights activists. Anatoli Shcharansky, a leading dissident, was charged with treason. Along with a number of other Jews, he has been accused of working for CIA agents disguised as U.S. diplomats and journalists. American officials have sharply denied the charge. Fearing that a sensational show trial is in preparation, the U.S. State Department expressed "deep concern," pointing out that the accused men were all members of an unofficial group monitoring Soviet observance of the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki accords on European security. Clearly, the Soviets' destruction of the Russian group was calculated to manifest their disdain for the 35-nation conference that will convene in Belgrade on June 15 to assess compliance with the Helsinki agreements.

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