Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (18 page)

True, nominations involved collective, public expressions of enthusiasm.

Public organizations outside the immediate ambit of the Party—trade

unions, the Union of Writers, and so on—made nominations in their own

right and announced them at grand meetings. Newspaper reports recorded

mass enthusiasm at the meetings where the nomination was made, and

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

69

described a thoroughly bottom-up approach to political power.7 Neverthe-

less, and of course, city-rank Party organizations were in 1946 orchestrat-

ing events. Comrade Likovenkov, Party secretary of Moscow’s

Krasnopresnenskii district, reported to a gathering of his peers in the city

that nomination meetings for very senior candidates had proceeded at

various factories “in an organized way”; they started and ended on time, no

one left early. Other Party secretaries, whose nominees were somewhat less

senior, reported similar impressions. Yet the chairman of the Moscow

Party and Soviet, Georgii Popov, still looked for ways to tighten the effec-

tiveness of the nomination meetings, especially with regard to their capac-

ity to communicate political ideas in an emphatic way, in the Bolshevik

tradition; he called for better oratory, crisper sloganeering, even the use of

orchestras to play in and play out speakers and raise the tempo of interest

and involvement (Kiselev 2000, 119–25). All these were top-down ways of

orchestrating performances of the general will and fitting them inside regu-

larized political forms. These forms were aligned with the attempt to con-

struct constitutional permanence.

Some of the democratic deficit in the workings of the Supreme Soviet

was reduced by an established practice of petition and limited accountabil-

ity. Citizens wrote in large numbers to their deputies to seek redress for

injustice, bad luck or poverty. Much recent historical research has made

use of these letters; the vastness of the archival collections illustrates the

complex dimensions of ordinary people’s social problems and even their

opinions about public policy. Writing about a parallel trend in the German

Democratic Republic, Mary Fulbrook discerns participatory and responsive

qualities inherent to the letter-writing process, and she might be right

about the post-Stalin period about which she makes her point (Fulbrook

2005, 14, 269–88). Less controversial is the conclusion that the huge num-

bers of people who wrote to deputies—huge numbers proven by the size

of the depositories on which historians have recently so gratefully drawn—

were taking part in a process that had become regularized and almost con-

stitutional; although it contained some characteristics of clientelism, it was

also simply part of the modern post-war way of doing Soviet government,

and would in the Khrushchev era be backed up by a more legally robust

right to petition the authorities. It was an element of Soviet “democracy”

——————

7 This persisted; Jeffrey W. Hahn has argued that voting in local elections in the 1980s was “anticlimactic, if not ceremonial” after the more participatory procedure for nominating candidates. See Hahn 1988, 105.

70

M A R K B . S M I T H

that was associated with the Supreme Soviet, but not with the elections to

it, though it could not quite have existed without the electoral system.

In various ways, the electoral process required popular participation,

but it rejected any manifestation of dissent or alternative opinion, and did

not seek to persuade voters, but to present policy and politicians to an

often skeptical population.8 Stalin lay at the heart of this mass presentation,

which appealed to principles both of popular sovereignty and modern

constitutionalism. His cult reached a still new level of ubiquity during the

campaign. His election speech at the Bolshoi Theater shortly before polling

day was one of the major set-piece speeches of his entire career. Each

citizen’s relationship with their leader was emphasized during the cam-

paign, rhetorically renewing the bond that united them. Public culture

insisted that this popular sovereignty had been revitalized by victory, and

had been bolstered both by Stalin’s wartime genius and the people’s war-

time sacrifices. It was publicized extensively during the campaign.9 Marshal

Georgii Zhukov was one of the most prominent Supreme Soviet candi-

dates in 1946; the speeches that nominated him as a candidate focused

completely on the war (
Krasnaia zvezda
, January 28, 1946, 2). This domestic and international self-presentation—of a victorious superpower—was

couched in democratic terms. At a nomination meeting in Moscow early in

February 1946, for example, a Stakhanovite stonemason, N. P. Babikin,

declared:

We are gathered here to discuss and nominate a candidate for the Supreme Soviet

of the USSR. The first elections to the Supreme Soviet were conducted eight years ago. Since that time events of great historical importance have happened in the life of our country. […] We were victorious because we have Soviet rule—the most

just, the most democratic rule in the world (
Pravda
, February 3, 1946).

Similarly, following the elections, the first speech of the first session on

March 12 emphasized above all the great feat of victory, the role of the

institutions of state and Party and especially of Stalin, in the service of a

way of politics that was “the most democratic in the world” (
Zasedaniia

Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR
1946, 4).

The campaign theme of victory was thus closely connected to themes

of Soviet democracy, constitutionalism, and rights. In 1946, the elections

——————

8 For a description of the elaboration of public information in a post-Stalin election campaign, see Mote 1965, ch. 3.

9 On the place of the war in the election campaign generally, see Jones 2008.

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

71

were a chance for the Communist Party and Soviet government to show-

case the rights that the 1936 constitution had granted, and for voters to

demonstrate their awareness of the significance of these rights and—para-

doxically—their gratitude to Soviet power. Constitutional rights included

the right to work, to have leisure, to obtain welfare benefits, to be edu-

cated, to exercise the freedoms of speech, assembly and association, and to

enjoy the inviolability of the person and the home, unencumbered by dis-

crimination based on gender, nationality or race.10 Under Stalin and after,

the right to vote was granted central rhetorical importance, as “the most

important part of the democratic rights and freedoms, which every citizen

of the USSR possesses” (Gorshenev and Cheliapov 1959, 63). It was the

focus of an entire chapter of the constitution.11 Yet, despite the constitu-

tional framework, the right to vote was not recognizably liberal or democ-

ratic. Instead, it was the right to participate in a monolithic populist sover-

eignty; Stalin-era and post-Stalin commentators alike described a unani-

mous popular will (Gusev 1957, 4). Only by agreeing with everyone else

was the right to vote empirically “real”. Many other rights were demonstra-

bly false. No one was exercising their right to hold public demonstrations

or to publish freely, for example. Indeed, rights would only break beyond

rhetoric and into people’s understanding of their everyday lives after

Stalin’s death, and then only within limited spheres, especially those associ-

ated with welfare, education and the home. Yet, while the late Stalinist

polity remained arbitrary, “rights” were a crucial aspect of its public

culture. They were a means by which the Party-government could explain

to the population its apparently practical legitimacy, and the rhetoric of

rights (but certainly not their practice) was one of the most distinctive

structuring features of the 1946 campaign.

The children’s newspaper
Pionerskaia pravda
, which published detailed

coverage of the election alongside ideas for games and advice about

homework, ran a series of very prominent articles just before the campaign

on the meaning of constitutional rights for school children.12 As a result,

public culture turned these rights into a would-be mechanism for improv-

ing the lives of even the very young. During the campaign (and just be-

fore), letters from children conveyed this idea to the newspaper’s reader-

ship. Whether the letters are fictional is not relevant: their presentation for

——————

10 Chapter 10, articles 118–28.

11 Chapter 11.

12 E.g.
Pionerskaia Pravda
, December 5 and 18, 1945.

72

M A R K B . S M I T H

the attention of the young public is the point. A child called Liusia, who

was one of the leading activist volunteers at her school, declared that the

constitution allowed one’s dreams to come true (
Pionerskaia pravda
, November 27, 1945). In an interview with the newspaper shortly before polling

day, General I. V. Tiulenev juxtaposed for the benefit of his young audi-

ence the right to vote, the sacrifice of the war, and the expectation of well-

being (
Pionerskaia pravda
, February 8, 1946). Straight after polling, the paper offered a front-page poem for its young readers, which folded the special-ness of Soviet democracy into the unique array of Soviet rights: “There are