Antinomy of Classes and People in the Soviet Socialist State Theory: The Concept of “All People’s State”

The creation of a theory of a socialist state on the basis of the theoretical Marxist heritage became one of the most urgent tasks that Joseph Stalin faced. The works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not contain specific provisions about the essence of the socialist state. Only in Vladimir Lenin’s works did the concept of a “socialist state” appear, and the theory of the socialist state gradually began to take on clearer contours, but death did not allow him to create any detailed theory. By the end of the 1920s, it became clear that the theory of a socialist state could not be based on the principles of proletarian internationalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, which had received special development in the works of the classics of Marxism. This theory should have been built only on the principle of the people as the source of state and law in the USSR, i.e. the Soviet people as the source of Soviet power. This in turn led to the need to introduce the principle of the all people’s state (state of the whole people), i.e. classless society. Such a formulation inevitably and directly came into confrontation with the axioms of Marxism. The Marxist doctrine of class nature of the state experienced significant resistance when applied to the socialist state. The duality of the nature of the socialist state (class and democratic state) determined the difficulties for the development of the theory of this state. The article analyzes the prehistory of the doctrine of the all people’s state, which was brought into effect as an official designation of the new political status of the Soviet state at the 22^nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). This was preceded by an attempt to conceptualize the term “All People’s State” in the 1947 Draft of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (AUCPB) Program. The new concept was not part of the new theory of the socialist state; it was tested as a risky and experimental innovation without an appropriate theoretical basis. For the first time, this term appeared and almost immediately disappeared in the spring of 1936, before the publication of the draft Constitution. The article shows how Joseph Stalin and Soviet theorists and ideologists of the Stalin era, using Marxist terminology, slowly approached to proclamation of the USSR as an “all people’s state”, gradually filling the class structure of Soviet society with new “non-class” concepts. At the same time, the class discourse of proletarian internationalism did not lose its theoretical potential. It was subjected a specific transformation, becoming the part of Soviet foreign political rhetoric, including one of the most important principles of self-representation of the USSR. 

Keywords: Soviet state, dictatorship of the proletariat, classless socialist society, all people’s state, Joseph Stalin, the 1936 Constitution of the USSR, the 1947 draft AUCPB Program, the third CPSU Program of 1961