1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union

[2] The 1936 Constitution redesigned the government of the Soviet Union, expanded all manner of rights and freedoms, and spelled out a number of democratic procedures.

[3] Article 123 establishes equality of rights for all citizens "irrespective of their nationality or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life.

"[3] Stalin included Article 124 in the face of stiff opposition, and it eventually led to rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church before and during World War 2.

Those who participated included (among others) Andrey Vyshinsky, Andrei Zhdanov, Maxim Litvinov, Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Nikolai Bukharin, and Karl Radek, though the latter two had less active input.

The constitution was presented as a personal triumph for Stalin, who on this occasion was described by Pravda as "genius of the new world, the wisest man of the epoch, the great leader of communism".

[11] According to J. Arch Getty, "Many who lauded Stalin's Soviet Union as the most democratic country on earth lived to regret their words.

This allowed for two Soviet Republics, Ukraine and Byelorussia, to join the United Nations General Assembly as founding members in 1945.

Leonard Schapiro, for example, wrote in 1971: "The decision to alter the electoral system from indirect to direct election, from a limited to a universal franchise, and from open to secret voting, was a measure of the confidence of the party in its ability to ensure the return of candidates of its own choice without the restrictions formerly considered necessary"; and that "a careful scrutiny of the draft of the new constitution showed that it left the party's supreme position unimpaired, and was therefore worthless as a guarantee of individual rights".

Hannah Arendt observed that it was hailed as the ending of the Soviet Union's "revolutionary period", but was immediately followed by the country's most intense purges in its history,[17] the Great Purge in which many of the constitution's organizers and draftees — such as Yakov Yakovlev, Aleksei Stetskii, Boris Markovich Tal',[18] Vlas Chubar, Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukharin, and Ivan Akulov[19] — were imprisoned or executed as counterrevolutionaries shortly after their work was complete.