The 1936 constitution, the Stalin constitution, as it was immediately baptized, did assure democratic rights to all citizens: freedom of speech, association, and the press, freedom to demonstrate, freedom to propagate both religious and antireligious ideas, and inviolability of privacy in the home and in one's correspondence. Freedom of movement was not mentioned, but all citizens were given the right to vote (none were disenfranchised any longer), and elections were to be secret and direct. The Stalin constitution was proclaimed "the most democratic in the world."
As Solzhenitsyn was to say, the constitution never went into effect, not for a single day. Stalin gave his report on its draft form in August 1936, as the force of the Great Terror was mounting daily. In 1937, when the first elections under the new constitution were held, the terror reached its peak. Not that nonimplementation of the document was any great surprise. Previous constitutions had also assured freedom of association, assembly, and the press, but only "in the interests of the workers." The 1936 constitution had the qualifying phrase "in accordance with the interests of the workers and for the purpose of strengthening the socialist system." One thing was made absolutely clear: "Whoever seeks to weaken the socialist system is an enemy of the people."32
The new constitution granted equality to all in the sense that all were equally unequal. Stalin explained that the dictatorship of the working class remained in force, as did "the present leading role of the Communist party."33 This constitution added a step. In previous ones the Communist party's leading role was only implied. The 1936 constitution spelled it out plainly and unmistakably.
The official proclamation of the party's right to represent everyone, to lead everyone and decide everything, at the same time that equality was granted to all, marked the consecration of the totalitarian state, which had received its finishing touches during the first half of the 1930s. At the time another totalitarian state existed, Nazi Germany. According to Nicolaevsky, Bukharin had given a lot of thought to nazism, in which he saw the accelerated decomposition of the capitalist system. He was concerned to prevent a similar decomposition in the Soviet Union and favored building an international movement to fight fascism. Above all, the ideas of nazism had to be fought with better ideas. Nazism's central concept, as Bukharin saw it, was violence. We have to fight violence, he said, under the banner of our new humanism, proletarian humanism.34
Bukharin's remarks to Nicolaevsky in Paris in February 1936 had a pathetic ring. Here was one of the leaders of the October revolution, one who had contributed the most to Stalin's rise, dreaming in a confused and vacillating way about a possible "second party" of intellectuals who could advise "the first party." He had been searching in Marx's papers for some profound observations that other researchers might have missed, some guide to what should be done. "Ah, Karlusha Karlusha," he sighed about an unfinished article of Marx's, "why didn't you finish?... [How] you would have helped us!"35 Notwithstanding his Marxist education—perhaps because of it—Bukharin never understood that he had drafted the constitution of a totalitarian state. It was true there was a difference between this state and Nazi Germany. It could be boiled down to two slogans. Whereas Hitler said, "If necessary we will be inhuman," Stalin said, "Man is the most valuable capital."
The Soviet state relied on total terror, as did the Nazi state, and both relied on the Big Lie. The finishing touch was placed on Soviet totalitarianism with Stalin's proclamation of a "democratic" constitution. Under Lenin, terror was still called terror, and bureaucracy was called by that name, as was any uprising against Bolshevik rule. Under Stalin, as Ko- lakowski has written in his thoroughgoing analysis of the Soviet state, "the party was still being attacked by its enemies, but it no longer made mistakes, never. The Soviet state was irreproachable and the people's love for it was boundless." Having eliminated all means of public control over the government, the state justified its power with the argument that "in principle" it embodied the interests, needs, and desires of the workers. The state claimed legitimacy on an ideological basis. Kolakowski adds that the omnipotence of the Big Lie was not the result of Stalin's evil nature. It was the only possible way to legitimize power based on Leninist principles.36 The universality of the Big Lie helped Stalin in his claim that the 1936 constitution was a "document proving that the past and present dreams of millions of honest people in the capitalist countries have been realized in the USSR." As paradoxical as it may sound, in this case Stalin was telling the truth, for millions of people in capitalist countries belived that the "dreams of humanity" had come true in the Soviet Union.
Many were unable to see the truth, but many were willingly deceived. Yuri Pyatakov, who was expelled from the party at its Fifteenth Congress, then "exiled" to the Soviet Foreign Trade Office in Paris after capitulating to Stalin, and finally executed by Stalin in 1938, gave Valentinov-Volsky the following explanation in 1928, at the time of his capitulation:
Since you do not believe that people's convictions cannot change in a short period of time, you conclude that our statements [of capitulation].. . are insincere, that they are lies. ... I agree that people who are not Bolsheviks, the category of ordinary people in general, cannot make an instant change, a turn, amputating their own convictions. . .. We are not like other people. We are a party of people who make the impossible possible. . . . And if the party demands it, if it is necessary or important for the party, we will be able by an act of will to expel from our brains in twenty-four hours ideas that we have held for years. .. . Yes, I will see black where I thought I saw white, or may still see it, because for me there is no life outside the party or apart from agreement with it.
A real Bolshevik, Pyatakov was ready for anything. The specter of revolution was haunting the world, he said, "and do you really think I am not going to be part of it? Do you really think that in this great worldwide transformation, in which our party will play a decisive role, I will remain on the sidelines?"37
Eight years later, and once again in Paris (a city that seemed to inspire such reflections), Bukharin told Nicolaevsky: "It is difficult for us to live. ... But one is saved by a faith that development is always going forward. It is like a stream that is running to the shore. If one steps out of the stream, one is ejected completely."38
Party members closed their eyes to Stalin's machinations and willingly accepted black as white in order to stay in "the stream of history." Their thinking might have been voiced by the Negro spirituaclass="underline" "0 Lord, I want to be in that number/When the saints go marching in."
Some Western intellectuals also wanted "to be in that number." Others saw nothing special about Soviet totalitarianism because they considered that kind of thing natural to Russia. They portrayed Stalin as the direct heir of Nicholas I and Ivan the Terrible. Western Marxists consoled themselves with the thought that Stalin's socialism had nothing in common with authentic socialism, and non-Marxists assumed that nothing like that could happen in countries that had been spared "Russia's accursed past."
The year of the Stalin constitution, 1936, was notable for another crushing blow to the "superstructure," that is, to the intellectual and spiritual forces of Soviet society. Pravda indicated the connection: "The draft of the Stalin constitution reflects a fact of exceptional importance, the full equality of rights enjoyed by the intelligentsia." In the same breath Pravda recalled Ivan Pavlov's warning to young scientists: "Don't ever think that you know everything. "39 The implication was that only the party and its Leader know everything. Viktor Shklovsky, with the native talent for aphorisms he had as a young man, once observed: There is no truth about flowers; there is only the science of botany. In the late 1920s the Soviet government began to insist that there was a truth about flowers, about animals, about humans, about the universe. That truth was Marxism, and only the party and its Leader knew it for certain. The purpose of this campaign was to make the educated public more manageable, to make science manageable, as Mark Popovsky put it in his book on Soviet science.40