contrast, Khrushchev's vain effort to adopt a "new" Soviet constitution during the late 1950s and early 1960s was an attempt to bar new Stalinist, "cults of personality" placing more rigid, legal controls over the Soviet system. Meissner, director of the Institute for Eastern Law at the University of Cologne, finds that both these tendencies persist in the draft Soviet Constitution published last spring after two decades of stalemate. (The constitution went into effect last October.)
According...