Social Rights in the Soviet Dictatorship: The Constitutional Right to Welfare from Stalin to Brezhnev

The Soviet constitutions of 1936 and 1977 defined a wide range of social rights. Yet the Soviet Union was a dictatorship, and even in the 1970s internal and external critics alike denied the existence of any form of rights there. This article seeks to explain how and why constitutional rights to welfare became an important element in Soviet public culture from 1936, but in the reality of citizens' everyday lives only from 1953. It draws precise distinctions between the meaning of social rights in the dictatorships of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist eras.