History12 - Russia and the Soviet Union 1914-1945 (WWI-WWII): Political Change

In 1936, Joseph Stalin produced a new constitution for the Soviet Union. The constitution guaranteed Soviet citizens freedom from arbitrary arrest and the right of defense in a public trial before an independent judge "subject only to the law." These rights seemed to parallel those found in the U.S. Constitution. For example, the Fifth and 14th amendments prohibit the national government and the states from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . ."

This Warwick University paper describes the impact of World War 1 on the Russian economy and Bolshevik politics leading to Stalin's collectivisation and industrialisation policies.

In 1928 Stalin abandoned Lenin’s quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy in favour of headlong state-organized industrialization under a succession of five-year plans. This was, in effect, a new Russian revolution more devastating in its effects than those of 1917.