So foreign, in fact, did the very concept of a constitution--in
Russian konstitutsiya-- once seem that many simple Russian
people, historians note, sometimes confused it with another
imported word, prostitutka , or prostitute. It was not until
1918 that Russia, then in the hands of the Bolsheviks, received
a constitution, an ideological manifesto that laid down the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" as the basic instrument of
enforcing the revolution's rule. A constitutional convention had
been elected on a democratic basis shortly after the Communist
takeover in 1917, but V. I. Lenin dissolved it after it had met
for one day, since his Bolsheviks had won only 24% of the seats.
Three Soviet constitutions followed, the most recent in 1977.
The constitution drafted under dictator Josef Stalin in 1936,
which created a healthy decentralized democracy on paper that
still impresses jurists with its institutional perfection, did
nothing to impede in the slightest the epoch of political terror
that was then beginning.