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A fifth reason concerns the way that elections might hoodwink the

people. Social scientists working in the West during the Soviet period

pointed to the location of the elections in the regime’s “façade of legiti-

macy and legality”, and to the symbolic significance of the elections for the

population, since they allowed ordinary people a token of participation

(Vanneman 1977, 74). But this last point does not stand up so well to his-

torical analysis, since it overstates the credulity of the population and un-

derestimates the structural role of elections.

Despite their lack of liberal democratic rigor, elections and constitu-

tionalism were not a Soviet façade, but part of its foundation. During the

shaky post-war year of 1946, re-establishing the strength of this foundation

was a major priority for Stalin and his ruling circle. While the themes of the

campaign were presented for celebration rather than for approval or disap-

proval, this was because unanimity was assumed: the unanimity of a mono-

lithic popular sovereignty whose theoretical existence was at the core of

the Soviet system of rule. The campaign was a moment when power

sought to teach the people to express the will of all—the will of people and

power, alike and indivisible—in the language of constitutional rights. The

campaign, though, would fail to do this.

Forcing People to be Free: Popular Sovereignty and Unanimity

A fake electoral democracy was an indispensable component in making the

Soviet system coherent, in theory and practice. The tensions and paradoxes

that underpinned elections were essential to the inner logic of the Soviet

system as a whole. In two books, David Priestland has elaborated on two

impulses inherent to Marxism that directly influenced the construction of

Soviet institutions: Marxism’s rational, modern side, and its Romantic,

mobilizing aspect (Priestland 2007; 2009). The electoral system can be seen

as a product of both. The Bolsheviks might have held “bourgeois parlia-

mentarianism” in contempt, but they believed in the creation of modern

institutions and in the formation of a state that (before its ultimate

withering away) could efficiently serve the needs of the proletariat and then

the people as a whole. They had to make a modern bureaucracy work in a

socialist society (Friedgut 1979, 38). Elected and accountable institutions

were part of the landscape of modernity of which the Soviet project was

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M A R K B . S M I T H

deemed the center. For the Bolsheviks, it was inconceivable that elections

should not be held. Yet they found it equally inconceivable that a near

absolute majority—the 99 per cent—should not vote for them. Straight

after the revolution, national elections to the Constituent Assembly

favored the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Bolsheviks destroyed the

Assembly; for the Bolsheviks, permitting the elections and then violently

eliminating their outcome were consistent. One of their pamphlets at the

time declared: “The constituent assembly must meet in Petrograd, so that

the revolutionary people, and especially the revolutionary garrison, can

watch it and direct it” (Anweiler 1974, 211). This logic created in turn the

Soviet system of elections. Single-candidate elections were symptomatic of

Soviet mobilizing techniques. In formal terms, elections to the Supreme

Soviet were indeed a grand exercise in popular sovereignty, as Vyshinskii

maintained, but this was sovereignty indistinguishable from unanimity.

This popular sovereignty owed little to the feeble heritage of the

Duma-period parliaments between 1906 and the First World War (Hosk-

ing 1973; Emmons 1983), let alone to the elected assemblies of the medie-

val Russian lands, though its populist form to some extent emerged from

the village commune.6 The enduring weakness of parliamentary structures

during the Soviet period and after can be better explained as a result of the

popular sovereignty embedded in the Soviet system, which derived from

the early Soviets (Carson 195, 93–95; Kravtsov 1954, 9). The Soviets were

products of “direct democracy”, appearing dramatically in 1905 and then

again in 1917, and were elected in factories, villages and military units

(Geltzer 1992). Notwithstanding their free election, and the lively and ex-

citing debates that they hosted during the revolutionary period and espe-

cially during the “freest” year of 1917, Soviets would ultimately provide a

template for unanimity, with their public voting, high pressure atmosphere,

and exhausting, revolutionary intensity (Anweiler 1974, 54).

Both in 1917 and later, a determined attitude to class was the rhetorical

framework within which unanimity developed. Even after Stalin’s triumph

of socialism in the 1930s and consequent universalization of the concept of

citizenship, class remained the crucial discursive category. After 1917, as

other parties were sidelined and then banned, and as the Communist Party

came to speak with a more unified voice, elected Soviets became the repre-

——————

6 The existence of organs of local government (
zemstva
) was only one sign by the late imperial period of a political culture that might have had the potential to evolve democratically.

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67

sentative organs of a dictatorship—the dictatorship of the proletariat. As

so often, the inner logic of Soviet rule rested on discursive and practical

paradoxes. The point that revolution-era Soviets were “democratic institu-

tions” that “would be an obstacle to any force wishing to establish one-

party rule” (Thatcher 1995, 26) does not account for the way that the Bol-

sheviks were quite easily able to integrate democracy and dictatorship

within the Soviets as part of the construction of the Bolshevik brand of

popular sovereignty. This principle underwrote everything that happened

in the 1946 campaign.

Popular sovereignty and populism extended into various areas of life.

Wendy Z. Goldman has shown how in 1937 and 1938 factory and village

meetings, and elections to Party organizations at multiple levels, helped to

drive the cycles of denunciation that made the Great Terror such a dy-

namic and expanded process (Goldman 2007). Elections to the Supreme

Soviet were driven by the same pressures of unanimity, populism, confor-

mity and fear. They followed the prototype of the 1936 “all-union discus-

sion” by which the new constitution was publicized, when a dynamic un-

certainty and sometimes populist discussion lay behind a general face of

unanimity (Getty 1991; Wimberg 1992). The language of unanimity was

certainly ubiquitous in 1946. In a typical campaign article, the newspaper

Moskovskii bol’shevik
described “the indestructible moral-political unity of our people” (
Moskovskii bol’shevik
, January 8, 1946).
Pravda
splashed a banner in standard style: “Across the whole of the Soviet country, with the

greatest unanimity, candidate nominations continue” (
Pravda
, January 4,

1946). An elderly, disabled doctor was reported in the
Literary Gazette
as struggling down from his fifth floor home to vote and thereby to “feel

clearly my connection with the monolithic will of our people” (
Literaturnaia
gazeta
, February 9, 1946). In elections, candidates were elected unopposed by universal suffrage on 99 per cent-plus turnouts. Propagandists claimed

greater credibility for this unanimity by extending it beyond the Party; can-

didates belonged to a bloc of Party and non-party representatives (Hill

1973, 200–2; 1976). In 1946, the proportion of non-party candidates was

19 per cent (Hazard 1953, 75). For all the idea of a populist coalition, Party

and non-party candidates alike shared the same opinions, and the things

over which they agreed were by definition in everyone’s interests. It was an

electoral system in which people were forced to be free.

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M A R K B . S M I T H

Constitutional Rights and Modern Government

Popular sovereignty, populism and the “general will” seem contrary to

regularized principles of modern government, but in the Stalinist Soviet

Union, they were complementary. The 1936 constitution had created what

looked like liberal institutions, including a national parliament, and had

declared new universal rights. While class remained an essential means of

structuring Soviet society, the 1936 constitution removed the class disabili-

ties of “former people” and established rights for all. The 1946 election

was a natural time to emphasize these new rights to the population.

Following victory, and amid mass disruption and major-scale destruction,

the regime sought to make its grip on power as tight as possible. One

method was by emphasizing the durability of Soviet institutions and their

grounding in constitutional propriety. Institutions were renamed or

reconstituted to embody regularity and permanence rather than revolution.

At the centre of government, the Council of People’s Commissars became

the Council of Ministers (Gorlizki and Khlevniuk 2004). The dull

“parliamentarianism” of the Supreme Soviet, with its routine territorial

constituencies and apparently standardized voting procedures, reflected

this normalization. It recrafted the revolutionary inheritance, replacing the

direct workplace democracy and combined executive-legislative functions

of typical Soviets (Medvedev 1975, 131–47). In the quest for permanence

and renewed legitimization, the constitution was put at the heart of the

election campaign of 1946. The constitution’s emphasis on rights was

central to the way that the regime sought after the war to describe its

relationship with the population.

Even in the Supreme Soviet nomination meetings, gatherings that ex-

isted because of the Soviet heritage of popular sovereignty, the turn to

regularized constitutionalism was becoming evident. The mass meetings at

which candidates were nominated for election to the Supreme Soviet were

faint echoes of their institutional predecessors, the Soviets of workers that

had gathered in 1905 and 1917, and their expression of popular sovereignty

was trammeled by top-down and centrally coordinated political directives.