Soviet Constitution Article 23 rights-revocation clause

Soviet Constitution Article 23 rights-revocation clause is the qualification that shadows the constitution’s stated freedoms: after provisions for conscience, expression, and assembly, it permits those rights to be revoked if they are “utlitized to the detriment of the socialist revolution.” The narrative presents the clause as a compact expression of the distance between declaring rights and making their protection conditional on the state’s judgment.

Text and Operation

A footnote sets out the relationship among the constitutional provisions. Article 13 guaranteed freedom of conscience, Article 14 freedom of expression, and Article 15 freedom of assembly; Article 23, in turn, guaranteed the freedom to have any of these rights revoked under the stated condition. The clause does not specify in this passage who decides whether a right has been used to the revolution’s detriment, or what procedure governs revocation. Its significance here lies in the condition itself: freedoms are named, but their continued exercise is made vulnerable to a political test.

The text’s quoted wording contains the spelling “utlitized.” Preserving that printed form matters when identifying the clause, rather than silently substituting a corrected version. The passage supplies no further legal definition of the trigger, so the clause’s practical reach cannot be established from this evidence alone.

Drafting and Setting

The constitutional committee’s work appears in a footnote set beneath the main narrative. Yakov Sverdlov, identified as the first chairman of the All-Russian Executive Committee, had locked the drafting committee in the suite directly below the Count’s and vowed not to turn the key until the members had finished. Typewriters clacked through the night as the document was composed. The scene gives the clause an unusually concrete origin: the language of rights and their possible withdrawal emerges from a committee working under confinement and a deadline imposed by its custodian.

That account makes no claim that the committee’s circumstances directly caused Article 23. Instead, the juxtaposition lends the constitutional promise an irony of setting. The document was completed through an act of enforced enclosure, and within its catalogue of freedoms it included a provision authorizing their revocation. The footnote’s exclamation at this arrangement sharpens the contrast without supplying a further account of how the clause was later applied.

Distinction from Article 58

The narrative also identifies the drafting of Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code as a turning point, describing it as a net that would eventually ensnare everyone. Article 23 is a separate provision: it belongs to the constitution’s treatment of rights, while Article 58 is identified as part of the Criminal Code. Keeping the two distinct clarifies the narrative’s broader historical framing. The constitutional clause makes revocation part of the stated rights framework; the reference to Article 58 marks a different legal development and gives it a separate place in the account of political danger.

Administrative Context and Significance

Elsewhere, the narrative depicts systems that turn complicated human and social realities into legible records and procedures. Agricultural production targets were increased even as weather, a shortage of tractors, and resistance to new methods contributed to declining harvests; requisitions were enforced at gunpoint. At the Boyarsky, a new order passed through a waiter’s pad, a bookkeeper’s ledger, kitchen logs, and slips authorizing preparation and retrieval. Hotel files, meanwhile, itemized staff members’ failings and recorded qualities such as tardiness, disaffection, and desire. These episodes are not identified as applications of Article 23, but they provide surrounding examples of administrative judgment operating through quotas, paperwork, and personal records.

Against that wider pattern, Article 23’s importance is not that the evidence establishes its use in any one of those episodes. It is that the constitution’s own account of freedom includes a route by which freedom may be withdrawn when judged politically harmful. The clause therefore turns a list of rights into a conditional promise, and its position beside the guarantees of conscience, expression, and assembly makes that qualification impossible to overlook.