This is an official hardbound edition containing the 1977 Soviet Constitution alongside the constitutions of the individual constituent Soviet Republics.
Publishing house: Izvestia
Published: 1985
Pages: 743
Circulation: 100,000 copies
Price: 1 Ruble 30 Kopeks
This volume contains the 1977 USSR Constitution, often called the Brezhnev Constitution or the Constitution of Developed Socialism, which was adopted on October 7, 1977, replacing the earlier 1936 "Stalin" Constitution.
The Soviet Union was structured legally as a federation of 15 constituent republics such as the Russian SFSR, Ukrainian SSR, Kazakh SSR, etc. After the central USSR Constitution was enacted in October 1977, each of the 15 union republics adopted their own corresponding updated republic-level constitution throughout 1978. Official publishing houses issued these omnibus reference volumes containing the master federal constitution followed by the texts of all 15 republic constitutions.
The most famous addition to the 1977 Constitution was Article 6, which explicitly enshrined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as the "leading and guiding force of Soviet society". It formally declared that the USSR had moved past the "dictatorship of the proletariat" phase and into a state of "all the people".
