JEFFERSON among the SOVIETS
Johnson, Priscilla
JEFFERSON among the SOVIETS by PRISCILLA JOHNSON Seldom, if ever, are readers of the Soviet press treated to articles praising American democracy. Yet such an article appeared recently in Moscow....
...During his lifetime he was the American democrat par excellence...
...Yet Soviet lawyers have complained to foreign visitors in Moscow that since the death of the late Andrei Vishinsky there has been no one among them with access to the highest leaders, and no one among the leadership equipped to weigh the reform proposals being aired in the Soviet legal press...
...In the insistence with which its reforms are being put forward, Soviet law is unlike any other field of Soviet life today...
...The reader is left to wonder whether this article will at last signal to the Soviet leadership, in an apparently tightening political situation, that it is time to call a halt to the fresh winds of frankness that have been blowing in recent years through Soviet law...
...Soviet State and Law prints ever more daring articles, and still there are no new codes...
...Gromakov states: "The concentration of power in one set of hands is, in Jefferson's view, 'precisely the definition of despotic government.' Power need not be concentrated in the hands of one man to be despotic...
...Thus, Gromakov continues, Jefferson approved the guillotining of Louis XVI, for he believed that the people should be the censors of their governors and that a monarch should be punished like any other criminal...
...In another section of his article Gromakov outlines the separation of powers under the first Virginia draft constitution and notes that Jefferson opposed the concentration of powers in the hands of the legislature...
...Entitled "The State and Legal Views of Thomas Jefferson," the article is tucked away at'the back of Soviet State and Law, journal of the Soviet legal profession...
...Like earlier Soviet efforts, it was not a straightforward description of Jefferson's ideas but an attack on American historians for ignoring him as a radical and overlooking his kinship with the French Jacobins...
...The Soviet article goes on to explain the doctrine of natural rights and says Jefferson believed that men are not only born to these rights, but cannot be deprived of them and cannot renounce them...
...Gromakov mentions another tenet of Jeffersonian decomracy to register his approval of the reform whereby vast legal and economic powers have just been transferred from Moscow to the fifteen Soviet Union republics...
...Constitution in 1787, Gromakov explains that in the conditions of that day the retention of sovereignty by the states was a guarantee of democratic rights and freedoms...
...In the past, Soviet scholars have applauded Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, his proclamation that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants...
...Never has political power been held in the Soviet Union, as in the West, by leaders trained in the law...
...PRISCItLA JOHNSON specialized in Soviet law at the Russian Research Center at Harvard and now edits the material on Soviet law for the Current Digest for the Soviet Press...
...Elsewhere in his article Gromakov quotes Jefferson's description of the Bill of Rights as "what the people have against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse...
...He cites Jefferson's warning that if the Virginia House of Delegates were allowed to determine its own quorum, its powers would ultimately fall to one man...
...Ever since Stalin died the Soviet leaders have repeatedly urged the lawyers to get on with the job of drawing up new codes...
...Here Gromakov quotes Jefferson's statement that the king "is no more than the chief officer of the people...
...Gromakov says that among the natural rights Jefferson included life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and freedom of religion...
...if they have praised his campaign for the Bill of Rights, they have damned him a slave-owner...
...If they have praised his opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts, they have criticized his Louisiana Purchase...
...He also brings up Jefferson's well-known proposal for periodic review of the constitution...
...But they have never failed to point out that if Jefferson were a democrat, still he was only a bourgeois democrat...
...Gromakov's choice of a final theme is interesting...
...She studied the law courts in the Soviet Union in 1955-1956 and served for a time as translator-interpreter for the New York Times in Moscow...
...for two years...
...And as for the last of these rights, he says Jefferson believed that the convictions and opinions of men are not within the jurisdiction of the state power...
...and finally a single 'dictator' substitutes himself for the Central Committee...
...The article in Soviet State and Law opens with a quotation from the late Professor Charles Merriam of the University of Chicago: "No name is more often or more intimately associated with American democracy than that of Thomas Jefferson...
...Now, for the first time, a Soviet article points out that if Jefferson owned slaves, he subsequently freed them...
...Outlining Jefferson's proposals for the second Virginia draft constitution and the Constitution of the United States, Gromakov raises such fundamental issues as legislative veto, curbing the executive power, ways and means of preventing the chief executive from remaining in office indefinitely, abolition of a standing army, and subordination of the military to the civilian power...
...states rights controversy prior to adoption of the U.S...
...then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization...
...By contrast, the discussion of law reform has proceeded without letup...
...from a house to a committee, from a committee to a chairman or speaker, and thus an oligarchy or monarchy be substituted under forms supposed to be regular...
...Other portions of the article, while less pointed, are nonetheless plainly written with an eye to issues alive within the Soviet Union today...
...His role is merely to assist in working the machine of government "erected for their use and consequently subject to their superintendence...
...Or again, when he quotes a letter written by Jefferson in 1787, characterizing the American republic: "But with all the imperfections of our present government, it is without comparison the best existing or that ever did exist...
...Its criticisms of some aspects of the Soviet political system are heresy...
...Italics mine...
...Gromakov makes an implied criticism of existing Soviet practice when he says Jefferson believed that the laws should be clearly and precisely drawn so everyone can understand them, and that the constitution is the highest law of the land and cannot be changed through ordinary legislative procedure...
...Casting a wistful glance at America's political heritage, the article on Jefferson goes beyond any that have so far appeared...
...Under the contract between government and people, the failure of government to serve and safeguard these rights entitles the people to revolt...
...In conclusion Gromakov observes that Jefferson considered the study of law especially important for a politician and, himself a lawyer, "placed his knowledge of law at the service of political struggle...
...If Jefferson had the Virginia legislature in mind, Groma-kov can only be thinking of the Soviet collective leadership...
...The last Soviet article on Jefferson appeared in a history journal nine years ago...
...Compare this with Trotsky's famous 1904 warning against Lenin's "substitut-ism": "Lenin's methods lead to this: the party organization at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole...
...Jefferson's original words were these: "The House of Delegates, therefore, have lately voted that . . . 40 members shall be a house to proceed to business...
...One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.'" (Italics mine...
...The reader may recall that after Khrushchev's sensational disclosures at the Twentieth Party Congress, there was some talk in Russia of a new constitution to replace the so-called Stalin Constitution of 1936, and that ever since Stalin's death the Soviet leaders have been promising, and the lawyers urging, new law codes to replace those adopted in the 1920's...
...Turning to Jefferson's advocacy of a free press and his Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, Gromakov says: Jefferson pointed out that even in the best form of government those entrusted with power may in time pervert it into tyranny...
...The words in italics paraphrase Jefferson...
...Gromakov quotes Jefferson's statement: "Since conditions change and men change, there must be opportunity for corresponding change in political institutions, and also for a renewal of the principle of government by consent of the governed...
...In literature, for example, the five and a half years since Stalin died have been a continuous cycle of freeze and thaw...
...If the people are sovereign, what is the position of the ruler...
...But what makes this article an event is the way in which its unknown author, B. S. Gromakov, candidate in the juridical sciences, uses his praise of Jeffersonian democracy as a vehicle for some pointed criticisms of Soviet society...
...For example, by his repeated references to Jefferson's advocacy of the rights of habeas corpus and trial by jury, of making punishments more rational and humane and abolishing capital punishment except for treason and murder, Gromakov takes a stand in favor of law reforms publicly debated in the U.S.S.R...
...The very appearance of an article on Jefferson is remarkable at a moment when strict controls have been reimposed over most of Soviet intellectual life...
...And he says that Jefferson considered the encroachments of tyranny upon the republican system a crime against the people...
...They also succinctly contradict the Soviet leaders' repeated assertions since the Twentieth Party Congress that even the abuses of a dictator did not pervert the perfect Soviet state into tyranny...
...Gromakov goes on to say that by Jefferson's calculations a new political generation comes into being every nineteen years...
...Over the past two years the Soviet press has become increasingly vocal in demanding law reforms...
...From 40 it may be reduced to four, and from four to one...
...And there is evidence that the lack of lawyers among the top leadership is now a major obstacle to reform...
...Therefore every constitution and every law becomes invalid after nineteen years and to require that it be observed longer is an act not of law but of force...
...So the debate goes on...
...Describing the federalist vs...
...Gromakov may also have in mind the applicability of democratic institutions to Russia when he discusses Jefferson's opposition to Montesquieu's thesis that a large territory, such as the United States, requires despotic government, and that a republic is possible only in a small territory...
...Today, as in the past, Soviet political leadership is drawn from the Communist Party bureaucracy and the industrial technocracy...
Vol. 22 • October 1958 • No. 10
