In Front | A New Testament Epistle Quoted in an Unlikely Constitution

Excerpts from the Bible can show up in the most unlikely of places. The first constitution of the Soviet Union included the proclamation that “whoever does not work, shall not eat” (article 18). This is a paraphrase of 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” (NIV).

This phrase became a core principle in the early years of Soviet Russia. It was a slogan of the revolution under Lenin, who first used it in 1918 addressing a group of workers in Petrograd, Russia. An extreme famine was afflicting the region due to disruptions related to World War I. He said of this phrase:

In this simple, elementary and perfectly obvious truth lies the basis of socialism, the indefeasible source of its strength, the indestructible pledge of its final victory.

Soviet use of the slogan caused the head of the Orthodox church in Moscow to remark: 

I have seen this in a number of different cities on revolutionary posters. I am just upset that there was no reference to the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Thessalonians, from where the slogan is taken.

Sources: Bulletin of the Russian Information Bureau in the U.S., Volume 3, 1920; Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 27, 1972, pp. 391-392; https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/22b.htm; Accessed March 8, 2018; Vvedensky in Lunacharsky, Religia i prosveshchenie, 1985, p. 193; https://politicaltheology.com/the-bible-and-the-soviet-constitution-of-1936/; Accessed March 8, 2018.