Soviet Constitution

The constitution is invoked as an emblem of Soviet legality whose formal promise is contradicted by the reality of rule. In a retrospective account of the 1930s, it is described as having been promulgated without any intention that it be applied, part of a system in which citizens were forced to deny their own judgment. Its significance lies in that gap between declared law and lived power.

The Constitution and Political Falsehood

The constitution enters a critique of the aftermath of collectivization. The speaker calls collectivization erroneous and unsuccessful, then argues that admitting the failure was impossible. To conceal it, the authorities used terror to break people’s habit of thinking and judging for themselves and compelled them to affirm what contradicted their own eyes. The constitution belongs to this account not as evidence of a functioning legal safeguard, but as a document whose apparent authority helped mask a political order unwilling to recognize its own failures.

The passage places the constitution beside elections that violated the very principle of free choice. The pairing distinguishes the outward forms of legitimate government from their practical operation: a constitution may be promulgated and elections held, yet neither guarantees citizens a meaningful voice when political power dictates what may be thought or said. The resulting contradiction is not merely a failure to implement a rule; it is a demand that people treat the opposite of their experience as truth.

Law and Revolutionary Coercion

Other episodes in the novel show how rules and official decisions acquire force through institutions prepared to enforce them. During preparations for a new offensive, revolutionary courts-martial are instituted and the recently abolished death penalty is restored. Later, Commissar Gints addresses surrounded mutineers from a pile of timber and invokes the courts-martial and the threat of death to demand their disarmament and the surrender of their leaders. The episode shows law functioning as a military threat, rather than as a guarantee against arbitrary force.

Strelnikov’s record presents another form of revolutionary justice. He surprises opponents, investigates them, tries them, sentences them, and carries out those sentences with speed and severity. His actions suppress desertion and help reorganize recruitment, but the account emphasizes the concentration of investigation, judgment, and punishment in a single decisive authority. These examples place coercive procedures alongside the constitution’s unrealized promise: the state can act with force and administrative efficiency even where legal restraint has little practical purchase.

Official Decisions and Their Effects

The novel also shows administrative decisions reaching into ordinary lives. At a meeting, a speaker announces that a large house will be taken over as a hostel for visiting delegates and named the Tiverzin Hostel. Residents are given a year’s notice; working people are to be rehoused, while others must find accommodation themselves. When those present protest that they are all workers, the announcement exposes the power to classify people and determine whose claim counts, even as the decision is presented as routine public business.

A village account reveals a still more destructive interaction between official intervention and local conflict. Kharlam carries reports of unrest to the town and proposes a Poor Peasants’ Committee; Red Army men then arrive, establish a court, and accuse the speaker of evading labor service, fleeing, killing an old woman, and stirring up the village. He escapes from custody, but the village burns, the town’s soldiers die in the fire, and his mother drowns herself in an ice hole. The episode does not identify these events as a direct consequence of the constitution. Rather, it shows the fractured world in which formal institutions, accusations, local rivalries, and violence shape people’s lives—against which the constitution’s nominal promise of law offers no visible protection.