Strekalov Ilya N.

The article is devoted to the 40th anniversary of the USSR Constitution 1977. It concentrates on political, ideological and historical matters which were the basic values of the whole constitutional draft since the middle of the 1950's till 1977. The author determines how the creators of the Constitution took into account Lenin's ideological heritage and those conceptual provisions, which were the basis of the «Stalin Constitution» (by this phrase, contemporaries often meant the Constitution of the USSR in 1936). Those provisions were very important because the process of «destalinization» in the society and the state was associated with the name of N.S. Khrushchev, so, they were reflected in the draft of the constitution. It is also of vital importance because this serious question about the ruler's role in history of the country was controversial during L.I. Brezhnev's term of service, and this fact influenced the drafting of the basic law of the country. The work shows how Lenin's ideological heritage was taken into account when creating a constitutional draft. At the same time, despite taking into account both Lenin's and Stalin's ideas in the new Constitution, it was undoubtedly innovative for its time both conceptually and in some of its provisions.

The article is devoted to the 40th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of the USSR (1977). The background of making of the main law is considered in the article, in particular, the aspect of the legal-political borrowings of various norms, names and institutions from the experience of foreign countries. It was found out by the study that the creators who took part in scrutinizing the constitutional project were informed enough about the practice of foreign countries that were not included in the international socialist bloc and were named at some periods as capitalist countries, Italy, Germany, USA, Great Britain among them, for instance. The authors of the Soviet Constitution project were eager to examine the practice of these states in different aspects, such as political culture, as well as the borrowing of separate legal institutions and state bodies. It demonstrates high qualification of soviet lawyers who worked in the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR - the highest state body of the country. The archive documents show that soviet citizens also paid attention to the experience of nonsocialist countries while writing letters to the Constitutional Commission. The question of projects of using such experience and its future was considered in the context of historical events in the USSR in the 1960-1970’s.