69 min listen
Samantha Lomb, “Stalin’s Constitution” (Routledge, 2017)
FromNew Books in Law
ratings:
Length:
57 minutes
Released:
Dec 21, 2017
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
If any place (outside contemporary North Korea) can be called “Totalitarian,” it would be Stalinist Russia. Under the “Greatest Genius of All Time,” Soviet “citizens” 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—Communism—that existed only in the minds of Party theoreticians.
To me at least, it seems odd that such a place would even have something called a “constitution.” What use is a constitution when there is no real law? But the USSR had several constitutions. In her excellent book Stalin’s 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—much like the tyrannical state that ruled over them—not much interested in things like “equal rights” or, more generally, the “rule of law.” 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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
To me at least, it seems odd that such a place would even have something called a “constitution.” What use is a constitution when there is no real law? But the USSR had several constitutions. In her excellent book Stalin’s 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—much like the tyrannical state that ruled over them—not much interested in things like “equal rights” or, more generally, the “rule of law.” 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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
Released:
Dec 21, 2017
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Charles Lane, “The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction” (Henry Holt, 2008): Why did Reconstruction fail? Why didn’t the post-war Federal government protect the civil rights of the newly freed slaves? And why did it take Washington almost a century to intercede on the behalf of beleaguered, by New Books in Law