Document 66
Letter from S. Kirillovsky praising the Constitution, 1936
RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 232, ll. 56-57. Typewritten copy.
I am hastening to share thoughts which I have developed as a summary of all the tenets in Stalin's great creation. Unprecedented in the history of mankind, this greatest of state laws could have been produced only by a brilliant personality. What is potentially set down in it, so to speak, are all of the wishes and thoughts of working people on kolkhozes that have been expressed or could be expressed, so they may become part of the Constitution only as a footnote to one article or another. Here is an example: Article 123, in principle, provides for unprintable profanities and hooliganlike insults to religious feelings and female modesty and other manifestations of savage barbarism and crude manners in the sense that it displays hatred, contempt and disrespect for citizens as individuals, and this could be added as a footnote to Article 123. Exceptional cases of murder, theft and other excesses, which so to speak upset normal life, also come only under accountability based on Articles 128, 130 and 131, and therefore the working people's desire to detain such individuals without the prosecutor's sanction, in order to prevent them from eluding justice and protect life, honor and property, can be entered as a footnote to Article 127. The village soviet can detain them on its account as abnormal individuals and enemies of the people until a trial. The desire of working men and women on kolkhozes to reduce the powers of deputies are [sic] envisaged by Article 142, under which a deputy who does not fulfill the hopes of voters may be recalled at any time. Other desires of the working people, as material for the forthcoming congress, may be submitted to the congress upon final approval of the draft. . . [Gap in the text. What is apparently meant is that "there are proposals which if they were" (text picks up at this point)] to be implemented, would be a fly in the ointment, but time affords an opportunity to everybody to speak their piece and to think over what is good, the unclear and misinterpreted aspects become clear, everything, so to speak, is digested in the popular consciousness and the Constitution appears in even greater brilliance and majesty. With this Constitution Comrade Stalin, and I will put it in the words of Pushkin,"has erected himself a monument not of human hands, the people's trail to it shall not become overgrown."
While the 1861 reform gave rise to disturbances by peasants, and in some places to revolts that were brutally suppressed, Stalin's Constitution produced a huge upsurge in morale and enthusiasm. This draft, as the esteemed Comrade Kalinin has said, laid bare the ranks of classes alien to the Revolution and won over those who have a conscience and talent and previously were frustrated by a life of deprivation but were eager to join socialist construction. The atmosphere of socialism has lifted up the popular masses and united them into a single entity, as though by a law of physics. . .[Apparently a gap in the text: it isn't clear what it moves by a law of physics.] moving, it lifts up all objects, and this law is binding both on the physical world and it is binding on the world of the psyche. While the 1861 reform sent many people to prison and hard labor, Stalin's draft Constitution will release many inmates from imprisonment and forced labor with a broad amnesty for this year's anniversary of 7 November [date of the 1917 Revolution]--these are the desires and hopes of the working people. It is time for citizens to realize that no matter who they were in the past, the road is open for everyone to public activity and the construction of socialism. That is what esteemed Comrades Molotov and Kalinin said at workers' rallies. Aside from his other beneficial activities, the name of dear, brilliant Comrade Stalin should be recorded in the history of mankind in conspicuous lettering for the draft Constitution alone and the our century should rightfully be called the century of Lenin and Stalin.