Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (16 page)

Communist Party had supreme status (Hazard 1953, 64). There was no

chance, however, of the ruling order being disrupted by these elections.

The point of the elections was different.

This chapter uses a range of evidence from the 1946 Supreme Soviet

campaign and beyond to explain why the Soviet dictatorship held elections

and whether these elections fulfilled the uses ascribed to them. Part one

summarizes the general functions of Soviet elections in the late Stalinist

polity (1945–53), such as the need to offer a democratic vision to the West,

and to promote leading officials through the Soviet political order; parts

two and three address the ultimate, core functions of these elections, asso-

ciated with popular sovereignty and constitutional rights; and part four

discusses how successfully the dictatorship realized its election aims in

1946, and especially the aim of universalizing the language of constitutional

rights among the population. These four sections are united by the general

argument that for all the efforts of the dictatorship to make people think in

terms of constitutional rights in the immediate post-war period, monolithic

popular sovereignty robbed constitutionalism of meaning. Partly as a con-

sequence of this, the population failed to make much coherent use of

rights talk in 1946. Elections were built into the logic of the Soviet order,

but they did little to sustain it.3

Why did the Soviet Dictatorship Hold Elections?

The elections of 1946 were special. Coming so soon after the end of the

war, they must certainly be interpreted in its light. Yet Geoffrey Roberts’s

——————

2 The arrangements of Soviet elections are described in detail in Carson 1956: 72.

3 David Priestland argues that while ‘Soviet democracy’ was a logically worked through phenomenon, the practice of democracy, Soviet-style, destabilized the Soviet Union in various ways. See Priestland 2002.

62

M A R K B . S M I T H

judgment, that these elections “gave the population a chance to pass their

verdict on the regime’s performance during the war” (Roberts 2006, 328),

is somewhat difficult to sustain. The mechanism of single-candidate elec-

tions offered no scope for the exercise of public opinion, unless it was

unanimously supportive of the Party. Supreme Soviet elections did not

provide a space for negotiation between rulers and ruled, and only the

most limited dissent arose during the campaign and voting.4 Such a space

existed in other areas of Soviet life: in the convention of petitioning higher

authorities about one’s living conditions, for instance. It was also evident in

a restricted way during later elections, as seen, for example, in the way in

which relatively large numbers of people allowed themselves not to be

registered to vote during the 1970s (Zaslavsky and Brym 1978, 366). But

only in the most formal sense was a late Stalinist election an opportunity

for political participation. While historians are rightly now describing late

Stalinism as a fluid social and administrative system, its popular politics

remained emphatically monolithic.

More convincing explanations for these elections exist. Although the

principles of popular sovereignty and constitutional rights formed the core

of Soviet electoral democracy in this period, elections were also held for a

number of subsidiary reasons, reasons that were important but not funda-

mentally structural. Each of these reasons is significant as an explanatory

factor in its own right, and together they throw light on the more funda-

mental explanations for elections: popular sovereignty and constitutional

rights.

First, elections provided a way of satisfying outsiders like the Webbs;

the Stalinist hierarchy was set on eliciting favorable comments from the

Western intelligentsias, especially during the 1930s (David-Fox 2003, 313).

In 1946, in the context of the new United Nations, the soon-to-come Peo-

ple’s Democracies, and the pending Universal Declaration of Human

Rights, pressure existed to present the USSR as a democratic respecter of

international norms, and to out-do the United States in these terms. The

official turnout rates of 99 per cent or more were contrasted with those of

the United States, where (polemicists emphasized) problems with registra-

tion were just one means of mass disenfranchisement (Krutogolov 1958,

8–10). By extension, the USSR should appear as a desirable model of gov-

——————

4 For examples from the 1950s onwards, see Gilison 1968, and Jacobs 1970: 70–76. More expansive analyses of dissent are developed by Thomas A. Bohn in this volume, based on messages written on ballot papers in 1958.

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

63

ernment that could appeal to colonial insurgents in the disintegrating

Western empires and elsewhere in the Third World. Andrei Vyshinskii, a

famous legal academic, prosecutor and bureaucrat, wrote in his long tract

on Soviet law:

Never in a single country did the people manifest such activity in elections as did the Soviet people. Never has any capitalist country known, nor can it know, such a high percentage of those participating in voting as did the USSR. The Soviet election system under the Stalin constitution and the elections of Supreme Soviets

have shown the entire world once again that Soviet democracy is the authentic

sovereignty of the people of which the best minds of mankind have dreamed.

(Vyshinsky 1948, 724)

Vyshinksii’s point about popular activity, participation and sovereignty is at

least as important as his insistence on the international triumph of the

Soviet hyper-democracy. In fact, it takes us closer to the fundamental

structural function of elections, connected with popular sovereignty.

A second subsidiary explanation concerns cadres. Elections to the Su-

preme Soviet may not have offered a choice between would-be legislators,

but the nomination process did select the candidates who became deputies.

Together with single-candidate elections to more junior institutions of

Party and state, this formed a crucial element in the
nomenklatura
system and the personnel ladder. Many leading officials, including Stalin himself,

were Supreme Soviet deputies, and nomination for office derived from one

of the most influential of the networks of political patronage, which un-

derwrote the whole Soviet system.

Third, elections also allowed the police to measure the public mood,

both through people’s participation in the electoral process and in the

comments they made about it (when informers and agents were listening).

On a more technical level of surveillance, the campaign offered the regime

the opportunity to check people’s housing registration documents, to find

unregistered dwellings, and to correct addresses that had been wrongly

entered in the records of the authorities.5 “Agitators” did this job as an

incidental bonus to their task of looking up local people and persuading

them of the reasons to vote.

Fourth, these agitators, as well as candidates, newspapers and public

culture generally, communicated information, ideas and rhetorical con-

——————

5 An example of this in the 115th electoral precinct of Moscow’s Frunzenskii constituency is described in
Vecherniaia Moskva
, January 1, 1946.

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M A R K B . S M I T H

structions—propaganda—to the population. The absence of competition

in elections ensured that public information could be carefully arranged

and presented without distractions, interruptions, or unanticipated chal-

lenges (Swearer 1961, 135). This was especially important in 1946, when

the Party and government were seeking to deliver messages of particular

importance, at a time when the war had destabilized some of the meaning

of these messages. The themes that lay at the heart of the campaign in-

cluded the veneration of Stalin, the extreme praise of the candidates (“the

best sons and daughters of the Fatherland”), victory in the war, the unique

greatness of Soviet democracy, the dangers of the international arena (the

Nuremberg trials were proceeding at the time), and the genius of the 1936

constitution, with its panoply of rights and its capacity to improve people’s

material conditions at a time of extreme deprivation. The campaign was a

“total” performance. Election meetings of all kinds brought together tens

of millions of people. Armies of agitators campaigned. Long articles about

the election dominated the press for weeks, far more so than they would

after Stalin’s demise. Even children campaigned, or were presented as so

doing, and the words put in their mouths often concerned the constitution

and the exercise of rights. A leading schoolgirl volunteer from Moscow’s

Stalinskii district recounted the following tale for the Union-wide children’s

paper:

After lessons at school a bus pulls up. Having taken our little suitcases and bundles, we get on board, and the bus tears along the streets of Stalinskii district. We stop at the arch of an illuminated building. Above the entrance are red panels,

slogans and posters. Here is the agitpunkt [local propaganda center]. We enter the hall. It is full of people: the voters are listening to a report. Then they invite us onto the stage. The voters applaud us noisily. Today we’re showing them a montage called “The Stalin constitution”. […] We have already performed in five precincts. Everywhere we are well met and thanked warmly. (
Pionerskaia pravda
, February 1, 1946).

The infrastructure of voting also co-opted children in the process. As in

other countries, schools were used as polling stations. Another schoolgirl

volunteer was quoted in
Pionerskaia pravda
: “There will be a polling station in our school. We are very glad about this and will be able to decorate it

well. We will also prepare a children’s room with an election notice. We

will do this with great pleasure” (
Pionerskaia pravda
, November 27, 1945).

These sources display a performance; they do not necessarily record events

but combine as a “total” presentation.