Time-Warp Holiday Honors Outdated Soviet Constitution

The red flags had been stuck on the facades of buildings, making bright splashes in the usual dreariness of the Moscow autumn. Most people stayed home from work. As if caught in a collective time warp, the Soviet Union marked Constitution Day on Monday--even though the document that inspired the holiday, like the country itself, has effectively ceased to exist.

“We used to celebrate this day as one of our socialist holidays. But no more,” Nikolai S. Gorshkov, 69, a veteran of World War II who was slightly tipsy, told a reporter in the street. “And I do not know if we have any socialism left, either.”

The official version of events once had it that the workers and peasants here got the day off to honor the highest charter of “developed socialism,” the prosperous and happy condition attained by the peoples of the Soviet Union under the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev.

On Oct. 7, 1977, the Supreme Soviet legislature adopted the country’s constitution, replacing a document that dated from 1936 and the black days of Josef Stalin’s dictatorship. One newspaper recalled recently that the event was regarded by a large part of the population as an excuse to down huge quantities of vodka.

The constitution’s Article 6 officially granted the Communist Party the leading role in politics and society; the document included an impressive list of rights and freedoms that ostensibly were the birthright of every citizen.

As Konstantin D. Lubenchenko, a liberal Moscow jurist, recalled, such pretense of legally protected liberties was nothing but eyewash. “For instance, in what way were our citizens able to enjoy such a splendid right as that of freedom of speech? Or freedom of the press? Or the freedom to march and demonstrate?” asked Lubenchenko, a dean at Moscow State University.

“Few people in the country were naive enough to insist on their freedom of speech; they knew that if they did, they would get a dressing-down or even be taken to court,” he explained. “It was proclaimed that the citizens of the U.S.S.R. had the right to housing. But how could they use that right under the conditions of a severe housing shortage? And how does this right accord with the obligatory practice of securing a residency permit from the police?”

Such constitutionally enshrined freedoms didn’t stop the Soviet state from hounding dissidents or confining them to prisons and mental asylums, or allowing legislators or judges to be nothing more than puppets of the party leadership. The Soviet constitution was never meant to be a check on those in power.

Liberalizing changes during President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s years in power combined with the tumultuous events of the last two months have effectively rendered the 1977 constitution void; it is doubtful that a project begun years ago to write a new one under Gorbachev’s guidance will ever come to fruition. “There is no constitution, there is no U.S.S.R, but there is a U.S.S.R. Constitution Day,” the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily noted ironically.

Nonetheless, the notion of “constitutionality” is now so widespread that it was one of the issues in the botched August coup d’etat, although the constitution itself has been amended many times when the Soviet leadership desired it.

Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev used one of its amendments to claim that he was entitled to replace an ostensibly ailing Gorbachev. But Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin called the power transfer blatantly anti-constitutional and faced down the putschists.