Reference Library
Abolition of Privilege and Labor
A thematic collection of primary sources. Individual editorial notes identify authors, dates, editions and the scope of each translation.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersRights and Emancipation
A thematic collection of primary sources. Individual editorial notes identify authors, dates, editions and the scope of each translation.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersCivil Constitution of the Clergy (12 July 1790)
The complete four titles of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, adopted on 12 July and sanctioned on 24 August 1790.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersFrench Revolution: Constitutions and the Republic
The Constitution of 1791, the abolition of monarchy in 1792, and the Constitution and Declaration of Rights of 1793, with complete texts and individual sources.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersRevolution Abroad and Mass Mobilization
A thematic collection of primary sources. Individual editorial notes identify authors, dates, editions and the scope of each translation.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersFrench Revolution: Revolutionary Government and Justice
Complete texts of the Law of Suspects, Robespierre’s report on political morality, and the decree of 22 Prairial, distinguishing legislation from the report’s arguments.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersFrench Revolution: Constitutions of the Directory and Consulate (1795–1799)
Complete Korean translations of the 1795 Constitution and Declaration of Rights and Duties, and the 1799 Constitution.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersEgypt: Proclamation and Chronicle of Occupation
A thematic collection of primary sources. Individual editorial notes identify authors, dates, editions and the scope of each translation.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersJourdan-Delbrel Conscription Law (5 September 1798)
The complete 63 articles of the Directory's law on the formation of the army of 19 Fructidor Year VI (5 September 1798), which enrolled every Frenchman aged 20 to 25 in five annual conscription classes called up youngest first.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersProvisional Government decree restoring the death penalty at the front and creating military-revolutionary courts (1917)
Having abolished the death penalty in March, the Provisional Government restored it at the front on 12 (25) July 1917, days after the July Days and the collapse of the Galician offensive, and created military-revolutionary courts of three officers and three soldiers in every division to try treason, desertion and mutiny summarily, with sentences final on pronouncement and executed without delay. Translated from item 2 of journal No. 129 with the fifteen rules on the courts.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe First Decrees of the October Revolution
Five acts from the regime's first two months: the eight-hour day enacted by telegraph, the workers' control statute that abolished commercial secrecy, the Sovnarkom protocol that created the Cheka, and the marriage and divorce decrees that moved the family from church to state.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersDecree on the Emergency Powers of the People's Commissar for Food
The decree of 13 May 1918 that established the food dictatorship: compulsory declaration of grain surpluses, the enemy-of-the-people clause with informer rewards, and the Food Commissar's nine emergency powers including the use of armed force.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe 1918 Constitution of the RSFSR
Complete Korean translation of the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets on July 10, 1918. Opening with the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People, its six parts and 90 articles set out the construction of Soviet power around the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars, an electoral system weighted toward the working class with the disenfranchisement of exploiters, budgetary law, and the state emblem and flag. Translated from the Russian text as adopted.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe Church Valuables Decree and Lenin's Shuya Letter
The public decree of 23 February 1922 ordering the confiscation of church valuables for famine relief, and the top-secret letter Lenin circulated to the Politburo after the bloodshed at Shuya: the public face of the operation and its inside, first published only in 1990.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe 1924 Constitution of the USSR
A complete Korean translation of the first Soviet constitution, adopted by the Second Congress of Soviets of the USSR on 31 January 1924. It binds the December 1922 Declaration and Treaty on the formation of the USSR into one basic law, defining in eleven chapters and seventy-two articles the powers of the Congress of Soviets, the two chambers of the Central Executive Committee (Soviet of the Union and Soviet of Nationalities), the Council of People's Commissars and the all-union commissariats, the Supreme Court and the OGPU. The reservation of republican sovereignty and the right of free secession are written down here for the first time. Translated from the Russian text as adopted.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe 1936 Constitution of the USSR
Complete Korean translation of the 1936 Soviet Constitution (the "Stalin Constitution"), adopted by the Extraordinary 8th Congress of Soviets on December 5, 1936. Its 13 chapters and 146 articles define the social and state structure, organs of power, citizens' rights and duties, and the electoral system. Translated from the English text incorporating amendments through the 8th session of the Supreme Soviet (Stalin, Works, Vol. 14).
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersNKVD Operational Orders
Full Korean translation of eight NKVD operational orders and directives of 1937-38, in order of issue. Nos. 00439 (German), 00485 (Polish), 00593 (Harbin returnees), 49990 (Latvian) and 50215 (Greek) opened the national operations; No. 00447 launched the mass operation with per-republic execution and camp quotas; No. 00486 governed the wives and children of the convicted; No. 00606 set up the special troikas that judged the resulting cases. The quota figures are carried over from the source unchanged.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersPeople's Commissar of Defence Order No. 0040 on the Lake Khasan events (1938)
Voroshilov's secret order of 4 September 1938, three weeks after the fighting at Lake Khasan. Behind a battle recorded as a victory it itemises the unreadiness of the Far Eastern troops, lays the blame on Marshal Blyukher in the language of 'defeatism' and 'sabotage', and dissolves the Far Eastern Front into two Separate Red Banner Armies under Shtern and Konev. Blyukher was arrested soon after and died under interrogation.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThree Vichy Documents: the Constitutional Law, the Statut des Juifs, the Ordinance Restoring Republican Legality (1940–1944)
The constitutional law of 10 July 1940 that handed full powers to Pétain, the Statut des Juifs of 3 October that Vichy enacted on its own initiative, and the Provisional Government's ordinance of 9 August 1944 declaring that 'the Republic has never ceased to exist' and voiding both. The end and the rebirth of the Third Republic in three laws.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersFührer Directives Nos. 16 and 17 (1940)
Hitler's two directives a month after the fall of France. No. 16 (16 July) orders the preparation of a landing in England on a broad front from Ramsgate to west of the Isle of Wight under the code name 'Sea Lion', with the defeat of the RAF as its precondition; No. 17 (1 August) puts that precondition into effect, ordering the intensified air and sea war from 5 August while reserving 'terror attacks as reprisals' to the Führer. The order papers of the Battle of Britain.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersDirective No. 21: Case Barbarossa
Full text of the top-secret directive of 18 December 1940 ordering the Wehrmacht to prepare to crush the Soviet Union even before the war with England was over, translated from the Nuremberg trial version.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersGerman Orders to Annihilate Cities — the 'Future of the City of Petersburg' Directive (1941) and Himmler on the Order to Destroy Warsaw (1944)
Paragraphs 1–3 of the directive 'The Future of the City of Petersburg' of 22 September 1941, issued days after the ring around Leningrad closed (raze the city; refuse any offer of surrender), and the passages of the Naval War Staff order of 29 September (Nuremberg document C-124) quoted in the IMT indictment, declaring that the survival and feeding of the population 'cannot and should not be solved by us'. Added is the excerpt of Himmler's speech to the Wehrkreis commanders on 21 September 1944, recalling what he told Hitler on hearing of the Warsaw uprising and his own order that 'every block of houses is to be burned down and blown up'. Only the excerpts transmitted by the sources are translated.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersFührer Directive No. 41 (1942)
The order paper of the 1942 summer offensive. As soon as the winter battle ends, all available forces are to be concentrated in the southern sector to 'destroy definitively the living strength remaining to the Soviets', encircle and annihilate the enemy west of the Don and advance to the Caucasus oilfields, while Stalingrad is to be reached 'or at least brought under the fire of heavy artillery'. Its execution led to Stalingrad.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & orders'Not One Step Back' and the Soviet High Command: Order No. 227, Directive No. 170703, the Stalingrad ultimatum, Order No. 20 (1942–1945)
Order No. 227 of July 1942, 'Not One Step Back', which forbade retreat and institutionalised penal units and blocking detachments; Stavka Directive No. 170703 of December 1942 ordering Operation Iskra to break the Leningrad blockade; the ultimatum of 8 January 1943 offering surrender terms to Paulus's encircled 6th Army; and Order No. 20 of 1 May 1945, issued amid the Berlin street fighting, which foretold victory and first named four 'hero cities'. Four documents of the Soviet high command from the Stalingrad crisis to the fall of Berlin.
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