The Legal Position of Soviet Nationalities and Their Territorial Units according to the 1977 Constitution of the USSR

Abstract

I The new (1977) Constitution of the USSR, in comparison with the 1936 Constitution, is a document of macroscopic size and microscopic change. This is the generally held view of students of the new Basic Law of the Soviet Union. Indeed the new Soviet Constitution is basically an extended version of the previous one. It is so close to being a repetition that at first one might even wonder why Soviet authorities had to draft and to adopt a new Basic Law of the country at all. The only reason for doing so was, most probably, the general zeal of the Brezhnevite leadership of the CPSU to close all possible gaps which would officially indicate or recognize the slightest imperfection and hence instability of the Soviet social-political system as it stands today. The persistence of the 1936 Constitution's legal vigor obviously represented such a gap since as early as 1961, at its Twenty-second Congress, the Party proclaimed it outdated, unsuitable for use in post-Stalinist time, and therefore due to be replaced by a new one. In accordance with this Party directive, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1962 created a special Constitutional Commission, charged with the drafting of a new Soviet Constitution. The very existence of such a Commission during the last 16 years pointed at a forthcoming change of the country's institutions. This situation was apparently intolerable much longer and had to be brought to an end. In other words the new Constitution was necessary to complete the official picture of the USSR's total political stability, not to change institutions or basic legal prescriptions. This perhaps was, at least in part, the goal of the reformer Khrushchev when he created the Constitutional Commission but never that of the stabilizer Brezhnev, who, as we know, replaced Khrushchev in the Commission's chair after 1964 and froze its work for more than a decade. In spite of the fact that the new Constitution is basically an extended version of the previous one, it would be incorrect to see it as merely a