The USSR Constitution of 1936: A Declarative Source of Law

The author focuses on the problems of constitutional construction in the history of the Soviet state. The study is based on the Constitution of the USSR of 1936 as a legal source, the content of which still attracts the attention of experts and generates various assessments of this legal source. The paper analyzes the features of the legal norms of the Constitution of the USSR in the context of political development of the Soviet state in the 30–50s of the 20th century. Special attention is paid to the assessment of the declarative nature of individual norms of law. There is a certain interrelation between the concepts of declarative norms of law and constitutional values. At the same time, the author draws attention to the fact that Soviet constitutionalism adopted the experience of state and law transformations in Europe during the Great French Revolution. It was France that contributed to the wide dissemination of documents-declarations that formed the basis of the constitutions of the opposing political forces and reflected their programmatic attitudes. It should also be noted that one of the sources of the USSR Constitution of 1936 was the Weimar Constitution of 1919 in Germany, primarily in terms of declaring the rights and freedoms of citizens. The relevance of historical and legal analysis of the Soviet Constitution of 1936 is obvious due to the fact that there is no uniform approach in the academic literature in interpreting the content of declarative constitutional norms. Legal scholars, along with declarative norms of law, identify target norms, norms-principles, norms-definitions, which increases discrepancies and deprives the norms-declarations of content in practice. In historical studies, on the contrary, declarativity of the Constitution of the USSR is considered in the context of the failure to implement its legal norms in the realities of the political system of the Stalinist period. One can find statements that it was the 1936 Constitution that contributed to the formation of a regime based on autocracy and lawlessness («repressive constitutionalism», «nominal constitutionalism»). However, it must be borne in mind that the legal and historical analysis of the Constitution are based on different methodological approaches, which determines the presence in the scientific space of excellent assessments of the political and legal significance of the 1936 Constitution of the USSR for the history of Russian statehood development.

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