Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Following two years of public consultation and discussion, the USSR adopted a new constitution in December 1936.²⁹⁴ Stalin’s speech on the draft showed he’d done some comparative research on the constitutions of other states.²⁹⁵ One of his sources was a section on the United States in a 1935 book, Konstitutsii Burzhuaznykh Stran (Constitutions of the Bourgeois Countries), in which he noted the US Constitution was based on the principle of balance between the Executive, the Judiciary and the Legislature. When the Soviet author of this piece, M. Tanin, commented that America’s entry into the First World War had resulted in a presidency that amounted to a ‘democratic Caesarism’, Stalin circled the phrase and wrote NB in the margin. Then he marked passages describing the role of the different branches of government and the fact that American women had not been able to vote until the ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution in 1920. In relation to American ‘Negroes’ he marked a paragraph which stated that, while they had the formal right to vote, it was exceedingly difficult for them to do so in many southern states.

The book reproduced (in Russian translation) the full text of the American Constitution. What caught Stalin’s eye was its first paragraph: ‘We the People of the United States . . .’²⁹⁶

A year after the 1936 constitution was adopted, there were elections to the newly created Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. In his election speech, Stalin highlighted the differences between Soviet and bourgeois-democratic elections:

Universal elections exist and are held in some capitalist countries, too, so-called democratic countries. But in what atmosphere are elections held there? In an atmosphere of class conflicts, in an atmosphere of class enmity, in an atmosphere of pressure brought to bear on the electors by the capitalists, landlords, bankers and other capitalist sharks. Such elections, even if they are universal, equal, secret and direct, cannot be called altogether free and altogether democratic elections.

Here, in our country, on the contrary, elections are held in an entirely different atmosphere. Here there are no capitalists and no landlords and, consequently, no pressure is exerted by propertied classes on non-propertied classes. Here elections are held in an atmosphere of collaboration between the workers, the peasants and the intelligentsia, in an atmosphere of mutual confidence between them, in an atmosphere, I would say, of mutual friendship; because there are no capitalists in our country, no landlords, no exploitation and nobody, in fact, to bring pressure to bear on people in order to distort their will.

That is why our elections are the only really free and really democratic elections in the whole world.²⁹⁷

Implicit here was the theoretical rationale of the one-party Soviet system: competitive party elections in capitalist democracies reflected the existence of antagonistic classes, whereas in the Soviet Union class relations were non-antagonistic, so there was no need for more than one political party. Hence Soviet electors could only vote for candidates pre-selected by the communist party. They could vote against candidates (who required a majority to get elected) but in practice it was difficult to do so without identifying yourself as a dissident. Unsurprisingly, 98 per cent of the 90 million votes in the 1937 election were cast in favour of the party’s candidates.

A decade or so later, Stalin read with evident interest a 1945 book, Osnovy Inostrannogo Gosudarstvennogo Prava (Fundamentals of Foreign State Law). Written by N. P. Farberov, it was based on the author’s lectures to the Higher Intelligence School of the Red Army. Stalin followed closely Farberov’s discussion of different federal and confederal systems and the nature and basis of state sovereignty. He also noted sections on the role of parliaments, cabinet government and the difference between constitutional referendums and ‘factual’ referendums. On the US, Stalin was drawn to details of eligibility to vote and to stand in congressional elections. He showed no particular interest in the role of the Supreme Court but marked the fact that the US Constitution had only been amended twenty-one times in its 157-year history.²⁹⁸

Soviet–American economic relations were hampered by the US’s refusal to recognise the USSR diplomatically because of a dispute about the Soviets’ refusal to pay Tsarist-era debts. When diplomatic relations were established in 1933, Stalin was enthusiastic, especially about newly elected US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he described as a realist and ‘a determined and courageous politician’.²⁹⁹ He repeated this characterisation in his interview with H. G. Wells in July 1934, adding that ‘Roosevelt stands out as one of the strongest figures among all the captains of the contemporary capitalist world’.³⁰⁰