Samantha Lomb, Stalins Constitution (Routledge, 2017)
b'If any place (outside contemporary North Korea) can be called \\u201cTotalitarian,\\u201d it would be Stalinist Russia. Under the \\u201cGreatest Genius of All Time,\\u201d Soviet \\u201ccitizens\\u201d enjoyed no free speech, no free press, and no free assembly. The one-party Bolshevik dictatorship deprived them of their voices, their property, their livelihoods, their liberty, and often their lives all in the name of building a kind of society\\u2014Communism\\u2014that existed only in the minds of Party theoreticians.\\n\\nTo me at least, it seems odd that such a place would even have something called a \\u201cconstitution.\\u201d What use is a constitution when there is no real law? But the USSR had several constitutions. In her excellent book Stalin\\u2019s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution (Routledge, 2017), Samantha Lomb describes how one of them was received in the provinces and discussed by Party officials and the populous. She finds some remarkable things, the most important of which to my mind is that the people of Kirov (or at least the important ones who were consulted) were\\u2014much like the tyrannical state that ruled over them\\u2014not much interested in things like \\u201cequal rights\\u201d or, more generally, the \\u201crule of law.\\u201d Under the Bolsheviks they had evolved a way of doing things that involved neither of these things and they were fine with that. Listen in.\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law'