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Popular Sovereignty and Constitutional

Rights in the USSR’s Supreme Soviet

Elections of February 1946

Mark B. Smith

After the end of the Second World War, Western observers usually saw

Soviet elections as empty rituals that were derisory or comic, or as totali-

tarian ceremonies with sinister trappings. These were, after all, elections in

which only a single political party could field candidates, and then only one

in each electoral district. They generated an assembly whose delegates

apparently gathered to do little more than applaud a dictator. At a recep-

tion in the British Houses of Parliament in the spring of 1956, the Conser-

vative Minister of Housing, Edwin Duncan Sandys, made this point to the

Soviet Minister of Culture, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Mikhailov. Mikhailov

was a deputy in the lower house of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s par-

liament, and represented a district of Moscow. According to their inter-

preter, Sandys asked Mikhailov: “Did you have an opponent at the last

election?” To which Mikhailov replied: “Mr. Duncan Sandys knows very

well that we do not have opponents in our elections.” Sandys went on:

“Well, why do you bother to visit your voters?” Mikhailov’s response

seemed evasive: “They have other ways of expressing their dissatisfaction

with me. […] They can withdraw their confidence in me at a [candidate

nomination] meeting of the electorate. […] The voters are not expected to

judge us only by what we do for them, but also by our contribution to

national affairs.” Like Sandys, the interpreter seemed unimpressed, and he

prefaced his archived transcription with some comments about Soviet

“pseudo-parliamentary institutions”.1

During a visit to the USSR more than twenty years earlier, the leading

left-wing commentators, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, had formed a different

view. They deduced that Soviet elections proved the existence of

“universal participation in public administration”; even though the political

system had only one party, the procedure for nominating candidates for

election to local and national Soviets ensured that “there is never such a

——————

1 TNA: FO 371/122838, Interpreters’ Reports, 15: report by Mr. Kolarz.

60

M A R K B . S M I T H

thing as an uncontested election”; the country’s fundamentally democratic

public culture produced a Soviet government that was “less of an autocracy

or a dictatorship than many a parliamentary cabinet” (Webb and Webb

1935, 44, 46, 448). A few years later, they praised the Stalin constitution of

1936 for creating “the most inclusive and equalized democracy in the

world” (Webb and Webb 1942, 16). For them, the universal rights that the

constitution enshrined, from the right to certain welfare services to the

right to vote for the national assembly, were deeply impressive. They saw

nothing “pseudo” in the Supreme Soviet or the elections to it.

Yet Soviet elections were neither meaningless nor sincere: neither hol-

lowly totalitarian nor openly democratic. While their judgments do not

survive historical scrutiny, Sandys and the Webbs still provide a number of

contrasts that throw light on Soviet electoral democracy. This chapter

seeks to interpret that phenomenon by making special reference to the

Supreme Soviet elections of 1946. On the one hand, these elections had

some formalistic and emptily procedural characteristics, but, on the other,

they were also solidly constitutional, and were considered important by the

hierarchy of Party and government. The election campaign and poll were

static occasions in political terms, but they rested on a dynamic and some-

times unpredictable popular sovereignty that was presented as unanimous.

The exercise of this sovereignty was intrinsic to Soviet rule and was the

basic reason why elections were held. True, this popular sovereignty was an

incarnation of Rousseau’s general will and was a fearsome, institutionally

“totalitarian” consequence of the popular Soviet democracy of 1917. Yet

the Supreme Soviet, the product of the 1936 constitution, was an ideal

parliamentary form; in outline it resembled a Western parliament, and was

similarly grounded on constitutional rights. Indeed, a major theme of the

1946 campaign was the propagandizing of these rights.

In the USSR, elections took place at various levels of Party and govern-

ment, and citizens found themselves voting with improbable frequency

(Friedgut 1979, 73). At the top of the hierarchy was the all-union, bicam-

eral Supreme Soviet, set up as the whole country’s parliament by the 1936

constitution. Its first election took place in 1937 (the second was in 1946,

following the interruption of the war). Elections to all institutions ignored

recognizably democratic norms: most outstandingly, they were not con-

tested; by definition, they could not change an incumbent for a challenger;

and some of their practices—such as the need to cross out, often when

standing outside the privacy of a polling booth, an unfavored candidate on

P O P U L A R S O V E R E I G N T Y A N D C O N S T I T U T I O N A L R I G H T S

61

a ballot paper that contained a single name—were aggressively anti-democ-

ratic.2 Nonetheless, the general constitutional framework of elections, set

up in 1936, offered a robustly democratic prescription. Elections took

place according to universal suffrage, with even the “former people”, such

as the children of nobles or priests, who had been denied the right to vote

since the revolution, now being able to cast a vote. Constitutional rules did

not presume at all that elections would not be competitive, or that the