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Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory
Politics and the Discussion of the 1936
Draft Constitution

Upon its adoption in December 1936, Soviet leaders hailed the new so-called
Stalin Constitution as the most democratic in the world. Scholars have long
scoffed at this claim, noting that the mass repression of 1937–1938 that
followed rendered it a hollow document. This study does not address these
competing claims, but rather focuses on the six-month-long popular dis-
cussion of the draft Constitution, which preceded its formal adoption in
December 1936. Drawing on rich archival sources, this book uses the dis-
cussion of the draft 1936 Constitution to examine discourse between the
central state leadership and citizens about the new Soviet social contract,
which delineated the roles the state and citizens should play in developing
socialism. For the central leadership, mobilizing its citizenry in a variety of
state-building campaigns was the main goal of the discussion of the draft
Constitution. However, the goals of the central leadership at times stood in
stark contrast with the people’s expressed interpretation of that social con-
tract. Citizens of the USSR focused on securing rights and privileges, often
related to improving their daily lives, from the central government.

Samantha Lomb is a Dotsent (Assistant Professor) in the Foreign Language

Department at Vyatka State University, Kirov, Russia.
Routledge Studies in Modern European History
https://www.routledge.com/history/series/SE0246

42 German Reunification
Unfinished Business
Joyce E. Bromley

43 Oil Exploration, Diplomacy, and Security in the Early Cold War

The Enemy Underground
Roberto Cantoni

44 Divided Village
The Cold War in the German Borderlands
Jason B. Johnson

45 Propaganda, Persuasion and the Great War

Heredity in the Modern Sale of Products and Political Ideas
Pier Paolo Pedrini

46 The Age of Anniversaries

The Cult of Commemoration, 1895–1925
Edited by T. G. Otte

47 The History of the European Migration Regime

Germany’s Strategic Hegemony
Emmanuel Comte

48 Governing the Rural in Interwar Europe

Edited by Liesbeth van de Grift and Amalia Ribi Forclaz

49 Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the

Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution
Samantha Lomb
Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet
Participatory Politics and
the Discussion of the 1936
Draft Constitution

Samantha Lomb
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Samantha Lomb
The right of Samantha Lomb to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.
com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non
Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested.
ISBN: 978-1-138-72184-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-19400-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
For Tiffany Jean Fleet,
You were the Louise to my Thelma,
my best friend, and I miss your love and support
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgments viii
Archival abbreviations x
List of Russian terms xi

Introduction 1

1 Citizenship and a social contract: The drafting of the

1936 Constitution 12

2 Daily life in Kirov in the 1930s 40

3 Local realities: The implementation of the discussion

of the draft Constitution 62

4 Validators of socialist victory: The discussion in the local press 84

5 Popular voices: Interpreting citizens’ rights and duties 92

6 Integration, exclusion, and accountability 110

7 The Constitution, the 1937 elections, and repression 123

Conclusion 139
Notes on sources 142
The draft Constitution of the USSR 146
Bibliography 164
Index 169
Acknowledgments

Without the support of many people, this book, the work of over a decade
of research, reconceptualization, and revision, would not have been pos-
sible. At the top of this list is Bill Chase, my former academic adviser at the
University of Pittsburgh. He took a big chance accepting a graduate student
who knew no Russian, was incredibly patient and supportive throughout
my time as a graduate student, and has continued to give me indispensable
advice and guidance. I would also like to thank him for reading the manu-
script for this book in various forms many, many times and for always offer-
ing in-depth, constructive commentary. Larry Holmes, Professor Emeritus
at South Alabama University, also deserves my deepest gratitude for intro-
ducing me to Kirov and its amazing archives, helping me establish a life in
this wonderful city, and reading many drafts of my work and always provid-
ing thoughtful commentary even though I keep making the same mistakes in
my writing. Additionally, I would like to thank Aaron Retish, professor at
Wayne State University and part time Kirovite, for reading the final version
of this manuscript.
I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the wonderful staff at the Kirov
archives, particularly the staff of the State Archive of Social and Political
History of the Kirov Region (GASPI KO), where I have become a regular
visitor. I would like to thank the director, Elena Nikolaeva Chudinovskykh,
and the deputy director, Olga Anatolevna Malina, for being very welcom-
ing and accommodating. I would also like to thank the reading room staff:
Vladimir Sergeevich Zhuravin and Liubov Gennad’evna Poptsova. And a
very special thanks to Galina Vasilevna Nagornichnykh for helping me on
many occasions to read peasant handwriting. Additionally, I would like to
thank my colleagues and students at Vyatka State University for support and
help on this project, particularly Andrei Kibishev, Aleksandra Kasimova,
and Olga Perevalova for help understanding and translating documents, and
a very special thanks to Svetlana Pavlovna (SP) Lebedeva for many wonder-
ful Sunday afternoons at her kitchen table, which helped keep me sane.
Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family, without whose sup-
port none of this would have been possible. I would like to thank my mom,
Debbie Lomb, who may not initially have understood why I love Russia or
 Acknowledgments ix
the point of writing this book, but who has always encouraged me to follow
my dreams. My father, Ray Lomb, who did not live to see this project com-
pleted, but was always very supportive and proud of me. My cats, Squirtle,
Milo, Merida, and Owen, who listened to me reading and rewriting this
manuscript, who kept me company through many long hours reading or
typing, and who occasionally added their own text. And finally, my best
friend, Tiffany Jean Fleet, who spent hours listening to me complain about
grad school and Russia, who ordered books for me that I couldn’t get in
Russia so I could finish this manuscript, who bought me a new laptop so I
could keep writing, and who always had faith that I could bring this project
to fruition. I dedicate this book to her memory.
Archival abbreviations

GARF The State Archive of the Russian Federation

GAKO The State Archive of the Kirov Region
GASPI KO The State Archive of Social and Political History of the Kirov
Region
List of Russian terms

Aktiv those who actively engaged in political or agitational

work but may not be party members
Artel’ workmen’s cooperative association; a type of
­collective farm with collectivized means of
­production but private household property
Krai Administrative region/province
Kraiispolkom Regional Executive Committee
Kraikom Regional Party Committee
Lishentsy people who were deprived of voting rights due to
social class
Oblast’ Administrative region/province
Raion District (of a city or a rural district)
Raiispolkom District Executive Committee
Raikom District Party Committee
Sovnarkom USSR Council of Peoples Commissars (equivalent of a
cabinet)
TsIK Central Executive Committee of the Soviet
government
Zemstvo a form of local government that was instituted during
Alexander II’s reforms in Imperial Russia
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

We, the workers of the Regional Forest Administration, noted during the
discussion of the draft Constitution that the very fact the draft Constitution
was handed over for popular discussion is evidence of our union’s power-
fully developed might. The historically unprecedented fact that the people
developed the Constitution for themselves speaks to the people’s energy and
[to] our government’s strength and stability.1
from the Kirov Regional Forest
Administration’s report on the discussion

Soviet leaders reached out to their citizens from what they believed to be a
position of strength, seeking to harness popular enthusiasm and participa-
tion to further strengthen and stabilize the Soviet state. In 1935, in response
to changing socioeconomic conditions in the USSR, the Party and state
elite formed a Constitutional Drafting Commission to revise and then later
rewrite the Constitution of the USSR. The committee worked on the new
Constitution through June 12, 1936, when a finished draft was submitted
to the public for discussion. The discussion of the draft Constitution took
place over a period of six months, from June to December 1936. In this six-
month span, an estimated 42,372,990 people participated in meetings and
discussions across the whole USSR,2 during which Soviet citizens made over
43,000 suggested changes to the draft Constitution.3
While the six-month-long public discussion did not result in substantive
changes to the draft Constitution, it did involve Soviet citizens in a public
dialogue unlike any since the revolution. This book examines the discourse
between the central state leadership and citizens about the new Soviet social
contract, which delineated what roles the state and the citizens should play
in developing socialism and what the responsibilities of each were. For the
central leadership, mobilizing its citizenry in a variety of state-building
campaigns was the main goal of the discussion of the draft Constitution.
Central state actors tried to develop enduring institutional forms for ter-
ritorial administration, military-coercive power, revenue extraction, and
other socioeconomic functions through such campaigns.4 However, the
2 Introduction
goals of the central leadership at times stood in stark contrast with the peo-
ple’s expressed interpretation of that social contract. Citizens of the USSR
focused on securing rights and privileges, often related to improving their
daily lives, from the central government, but also made known their support
of and opposition to aspects of the draft Constitution.
Stalin’s Constitution shifts the focus from Moscow and explores broader
issues of state building and state-citizen relations by recognizing the agency
of local actors and decentralizing the historical narrative. The scope of the
all-Union discussion, with over 40 million participants, makes it impossible
to study it as a national campaign in any meaningful way. A focused case
study enables an examination and contextualization of the often-conflicting
agendas of the national government, local and regional officials, and of the
populace. This book uses the Kirov region, which is located about 550 miles
northeast of Moscow, to examine this campaign. Kirov is ideal for a regional
study because the debate there was animated and wide-ranging, and the
regional archives are exceptionally rich in materials. As the Kirov region was
beyond the line of German occupation, the archives were never damaged or
evacuated. Therefore, documents not found elsewhere, such as letters and
district-level reports, exist in abundance in Kirov’s two main archives: the
State Archive of the Kirov Region (GAKO), the main state archive for the
region, and the State Archive of the Social and Political History of the Kirov
Region (GASPI KO), the archive of the region’s Communist Party.5
Utilizing these archival sources, this work provides ample evidence that
Soviet citizens, particularly collective farm workers, engaged with the state
and pressed for some resolution of their local and larger concerns and voiced
their complaints about local governance. Regional studies such as this one
demonstrate that the Soviet citizens were not without agency and, in fact,
often shrewdly sought to manipulate state goals, rhetoric, and campaigns
to their own ends. But as this book argues, the people did not always speak
with one voice. Urban residents and rural residents, and at times differ-
ent generations, often had divergent views on various issues, as did local
elites and the mass population. Such differences should not be surprising
given that the individual experiences of the region’s population differed.
This study sheds insight into the different perspectives expressed by the
residents of the Kirov region and argues that where one worked, one’s life
experience, and one’s personal values influenced citizens’ views on the draft
Constitution. As such, it provides a counterpoint to the work of historians
who have written about aspects of the discussion of the draft Constitution
and the implementation of Stalinist campaigns and policies in general, but
have done so on a national scale and from the perspective of the central
leadership in Moscow.
The literature on the popular discussion of the 1936 Constitution is
sparse. Some historians, such as Robert Tucker and Sarah Davies, write
about the Constitution in passing and focus on the failure of the state to
honor the promises made in the Constitution. Davies in particular focuses
 Introduction 3
on the dissonance created when Soviet citizens compared the promises made
in the Constitution with the realities of their lives.6 Others, such as Ellen
Wimberg, focus on how Soviet leaders used the Constitution to promote
their own agenda, investigating the formulation of the draft Constitution
and the discussion of that draft in the Soviet press as a way to examine
tensions between various Party leaders at the time, particularly focusing
on Bukharin.7 J. Arch Getty, G. I. Tret’iakov, and Andrei Sokolov provide
good overviews on the development of the drafting commission and the
discussion on a national scale, including the most popular additions, correc-
tions, and suggestions, and how these suggestions influenced the final draft
of the Constitution.8 Both Getty and Sokolov note that many Soviet citizens
took advantage of this open forum to agitate for personal and local issues.
This study makes the same point. However, because these published studies’
examination of suggestions relies on Central Executive Committee archival
materials, their evidence is akin to snapshots from throughout the USSR
and is difficult to interpret except in broad terms. Getty himself admits that,
“without detailed studies of the Soviet countryside in the 1930’s, it is dif-
ficult to interpret such data.”9 This is where a case study like this one pro-
vides the much-needed context by framing the discussion within the setting
of Stalinist state-building projects and the patterns and concerns of everyday
life in the regions.10
New regional studies, which allow historians to view how campaigns were
implemented on the ground and how local and personal factors affected this
implementation, have served to drastically change the way Stalinism and its
state-building projects are viewed in Western historiography. Older genera-
tions of Western historians often had access only to central publications
or, beginning in the early 1990s, to central archival documents and tended
to portray Stalinism as a totalitarian and command-style society in which
any opening up of society was merely a ploy to mask the Soviet leader-
ship’s (or Stalin’s) true intentions. For example, Robert Tucker argues that
Stalin’s main expedient for camouflaging the terror operation in the late
1930s was his rewriting of the Constitution.11 Tucker reduces the discus-
sion of the Constitution to a propaganda exercise aggrandizing Stalin, who
“was a master of deceit who was making use of the public discussion of the
‘most democratic’ Constitution as a smokescreen for moves to transform
the Soviet regime into something approximating a fascist one.”12
Stalin’s Constitution joins a growing list of works which demonstrate
that the structure of the state and Party did not guarantee the fulfillment of
directives as formulated. In fact, seemingly more often than not, Moscow
was frustrated by the less than satisfactory fulfillment of central policies.
During the discussion of the draft Constitution, various Central Committee
members were frustrated by the improper implementation of the discussion
and the casual attitude of many local officials towards having meaningful
discussions and recording popular suggestions, as well as the local and per-
sonal nature of many suggestions. After the Constitution had been ratified,
4 Introduction
many Soviet leaders were concerned about former class enemies’ misuse of
new constitutional rights. This constant friction between the goals of the
central leadership and the goals of Soviet citizens is reflective of their dif-
fering interpretations of the rights and duties of the state and citizens in a
socialist society.
The sense of the population as embattled by the state pervades many of
the historical studies of the USSR in the 1930s. Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei
Sokolov use the diverse collection of documents presented in Stalinism as a
Way of Life to demonstrate how the challenges of building socialism con-
fronted people, often in life-threatening ways, in their daily life. They focus
on how citizens negotiated the disruptions that collectivization and rapid
industrialization created, but Siegelbaum and Sokolov demonstrate how
citizens learned to “speak Bolshevik” and advocate for their own interests
within the framework of rhetoric created by the state.13 In reference to the
draft Constitution, they note,

Seizing the opportunity presented by the Constitution’s incorporation

of a language of rights, letter writers and participants in formal discus-
sions projected their own ideas, hopes, and resentments onto the docu-
ment. Their comments and suggestions thus provide an unusual, though
not entirely transparent, glimpse into popular mentalities.14

Siegelbaum and Sokolov are among the first historians to recognize the
bilateral nature of the discussion and central state officials’ deep interest
in what the people were saying, as well as the plethora of opinions that lay
beneath a thin veneer of all-out support for the Party’s ideas.15
As the centerpiece of Stalin’s state-building policies, the drafting, dis-
cussion, ratification, and implementation of the 1936 Constitution weaves
together many threads: the political course the central leadership wished to
set for the country, its ability to mobilize the population, and the ability of
the people to engage the state using its own language and to agitate for their
own interests and desires. Such negotiations were taking place in the many
places where official state policy and citizens’ lives intersected. Siegelbaum
notes in his study of Stakhanovism that the state was not able to imple-
ment Stakhanovism by fiat, but rather the state and its citizens engaged in a
sort of dialogue interpreting how Stakhanovism would be enacted through
interpenetration of state and personal interests and mutual interdepend-
ence.16 Stephen Kotkin similarly notes in his groundbreaking micro-history
of Magnitogorsk: “it is possible to see—without denying the heavy coercive
force of the Communist project—a two-way struggle, however unequal the
terms, over the drawing of lines of authority.”17 In these participatory and
collaborative aspects, the designing, drafting, and discussion of the 1936
Constitution mirrors the development of other experimental social endeav-
ors, such as Stakhanovism and the construction of Magnitogorsk. Not only
are they contemporaneous state-building projects, but also they were all
intended to completely reshape the foundations of society.
 Introduction 5
For many historians, there seems to be a contradiction between the fact
that the USSR in the 1930s was a one-party dictatorship, aspiring towards
strong central control, and the popular participation of the citizenry in actu-
ally shaping the parameters of the state. This work argues that there was
no contradiction. While the Bolsheviks and the Soviet state had no desire
to yield power, both also viewed popular participation in state-sanctioned
campaigns as essential. And in fact, the Party sought to mobilize citizens for
such campaigns, whether they were in service of collectivization (e.g., the
25,000ers)18 or greater worker productivity (e.g., Stakhanovism). As these
campaigns demonstrate, the Party and state did not disdain popular partici-
pation. On the contrary, they embraced it, albeit within prescribed limits.
Popular participation was a way for the Party and state to communicate
certain goals and values to the population, as well as a way for the popula-
tion to help the central state to identify problems with the implementation
of these campaigns and local governance. While central authorities deliber-
ately structured such participation, participants often used the opportunity
for involvement to convey their own concerns and demands.
As historians begin to examine these campaigns in depth, they have found
much negotiating and maneuvering on the part of the cadres charged with
implementing state initiatives and the citizens charged with their fulfillment.
Siegelbaum notes that the Stakhanovite initiatives of the central leadership
were often dramatically transformed as they were interpreted and imple-
mented at the regional and local level. He observes that as initiatives came
down from above, they were transformed such that the campaign came to
be something less and also something more than was originally foreseen or
officially sanctioned. It was not that the central state and Party initiatives
stopped at the factory gates, but that what went on beyond them had a
profound effect on the formulation and modification of those initiatives, as
the management and workers tried to maneuver, accommodate, participate
enthusiastically, or resist orders that made their lives more difficult.19
Such negotiations are also seen in the other major mass social and eco-
nomic campaign of the 1930s: collectivization. In his pioneering study on
collectivization in Siberia, James Hughes argues that the Soviet leader-
ship employed mass mobilization and materialistic incentives to fracture
the peasants as a class and prevent resistance to the regime. Hughes con-
cludes that the “Ural-Siberian method” of collectivization was more suc-
cessful in part because it relied on the mobilization and organization of
poor peasant support.20 The Ural-Siberian strategy focused on organizing
small groups of poor and middle peasants to act as caucuses to wrest the
village assembly from the control of kulaks (prosperous peasants) and then
use the legitimacy of said assembly as the governing peasant institution to
vote approval for Party policies. Hughes notes that participation in both
collectivization and these peasant caucuses was secured by providing selec-
tive material incentives, including excludable benefits (from grain bounties,
to free goods from cooperative stores, and to a share of looted kulak prop-
erty) for poor peasants who supported the state.21 According to Hughes,
6 Introduction
“the implementation of the social influence (Ural-Siberian) method also had
entrenched the ‘state building’ organizational foundations, bureaucratic
structures and institutional procedures which gave the Party powerful levers
to control the countryside.”22
The idea of an active citizenry that embraced various aspects of these
participatory state-building campaigns is a relatively new idea in Soviet his-
toriography, but it should not be a surprise. In recent years, many good
regional studies like Hughes’ have allowed historians to investigate the
implementation of campaigns at a local level and the negotiations that took
place between local and regional state and Party officials and the masses.
Charles Hier argues in his study of collectivization campaigns in Sechevka
raion, Western Oblast’ that local Party and state officials were often lax
in implementing collectivization because they were the ones with the most
personal property to lose. He documents how local poor peasants worked
with regional officials to collectivize the land because of the benefits the
state offered to collective farms, such as tractors and high-quality seed.
Hier found that many peasants not only embraced collectivization in this
region, but also had to actively struggle against local Party and state officials
to implement central directives.23 In his study of the Kirov region, Aaron
Retish likewise notes that peasants embraced and utilized state programs
to strengthen their socioeconomic position and to improve their daily lives.
He notes that Viatka/Kirov24 had a strong tradition of local self-government
and advocacy, as peasants were well-represented in the pre-revolutionary
zemstvos. During the Civil War, when committees of the poor and other
collective organizations were formed, the peasants of the Kirov region
embraced them as a way to improve landholdings and gain access to agricul-
tural supplies. While these committees failed quickly in other regions, Retish
notes that they endured in the Kirov region and formed the basis for some of
the first collective farms here.25 The citizens of the Kirov region continually
showed great skill in adapting state campaign forms and language to suit
their needs. In his study of regional bureaucracy in Kirov in the 1930s, Larry
Holmes notes that the regional and local educational bureaucracy adopted
the rhetoric of failure and escalating negativity to account for the material
and professional failures that plagued the region’s schools. Doing so, he
argues, helps to explain their use of the language of victimhood to petition
for rights and privileges. These administrators were not just passively trying
to weather the wrath of the state, but rather used the state’s own rhetoric
and institutions to settle personal scores and to agitate for personal rights
and privileges.26
This study uses the discussion of the draft Constitution as a spring-
board to explore how the state sought to advance its state-building goals
by redefining social relations through the use of a social contract, the new
Constitution. The state crafted this social contract to help create a stable
legal base for society and to promote participation at local and regional lev-
els, as well as a way to make Party and state officials accountable. Like other
 Introduction 7
Stalinist campaigns, the discussion of the draft Constitution was often rein-
terpreted during implementation, making it a forum for negotiating how the
state would look at the local level. However, unlike Stakhanovism and other
economic campaigns, the discussion of the draft Constitution was designed
to solicit citizens’ opinions. While the regime’s leaders had no doubt antici-
pated outspoken support for their vision of socialism, this was not always
the case, as the participants used the discussion and the state’s language to
bring local and personal issues to the forefront, and in the process, create a
decidedly different interpretation of what the Soviet Union should be. The
drafting and discussion of the Constitution provides a unique opportunity
to study these negotiations, as the state specifically solicited and meticu-
lously recorded citizen answers and opinions about how the actual legal and
theoretical foundations of the state should be formed.
Chapter 1 demonstrates how the draft Constitution highlights the state’s
attempt to create a new social contract with its citizens and what it expected
from them in return. This chapter sets the context for the public discussion,
providing an overview of select constitutional thought and theory, which
played a role in the drafting of the 1936 Constitution. To this end, this
chapter concentrates on the development and evolution of specific articles,
which focus on the redefinition of citizens, and citizenship rights, includ-
ing the re-enfranchisement of former priests and kulaks. It illustrates those
aspects of the Constitution, such as increased material benefits, that the
central leadership sought to highlight, and how it hoped that the discussion
of the draft Constitution would be instrumental in generating enthusiasm
for state-building projects.
The second chapter emphasizes the complex realities that shaped daily
life and concerns in the primarily rural region by focusing on the demo-
graphic, social, and economic situation in post-revolutionary Kirov. Due to
the underdeveloped and principally agrarian nature of the region, many of
these concerns focused on land, foodstuffs, and material goods needed to
survive. Local power struggles, often over access to these daily necessities,
were a part of everyday life. These realities significantly shaped the percep-
tions of its citizens and the complaints and suggestions that they made dur-
ing the discussion. This chapter makes clear that the citizens of the Kirov
region were politically savvy, petitioning for personal interests through the
existing channels, such as the local press and local organizations, and using
the political language of state campaigns to give these local problems more
political significance. This chapter reveals a populace capable of using the
discussion of the draft Constitution to agitate for their own interests, and as
such, it offers a contrast to the view that Soviet peasants in the 1930s were
sullen but apolitical.
Chapter 3 focuses on the implementation of the popular discussion in the
Kirov region. This chapter addresses many of the tensions within the Soviet
system as revealed by the debate. The central Party and state leadership had
a specific vision of how the campaign should unfold. It wanted to enhance
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