Constitution Day – Then and Now

This Saturday, 12 December 2015, demonstrators in Moscow wishing to take part in a protest on Pushkin Square faced rough treatment from the police. It’s part of a long tradition, dating back to the mid-1960s.

Then Soviet dissidents first pointed to the glaring discrepancies between what the Constitution (of 1936) offered and the rights they actually enjoyed. A report from December 1976 in the Chronicle of Current Events describes what happened on this occasion 40 years ago.

There are differences and many similarities …

Source: 43.2 Traditional Days of Protest in the Soviet Union

(photo: Eduard Molchanov)