Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (20 page)

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M A R K B . S M I T H

like the campaign of 1950, did not generally succeed in its aim of making

citizens talk and write as if they were exercising rights.

The rhetorical coherence of Soviet rights was further undermined by

another theme of the campaign: trust. Elections in democracies and dicta-

torships present trust in different ways. In modern democracies, trust is

ideally earned by politicians who observe constitutional norms and allow

people to exercise their rights without hindrance: popular politics is medi-

ated through accountability rather than paternalism or deference (though

of course few such democracies existed in 1946). By contrast, in dictator-

ships, trust requires a leap of faith. In the 1946 Supreme Soviet campaign,

“trust” was constructed as a substitute for the exercise of rights, not as a

means of reinforcing them, and was often conflated with “faith”. For the

prestigious
Literary Gazette
, “the trust of the people” lay at the heart of the election (
Literaturnaia gazeta
, January 12, 1946). But this anodyne formula really served to subordinate the status of the population to that of power.

Typically, Moscow’s popular evening paper declared shortly before polling

that “The people have unlimited trust in the Bolshevik Party” (
Vecherniaia

Moskva
, February 5, 1946). Writing of political elites, the teachers’ newspaper
Uchitel’skaia gazeta
claimed: “the people [rightly] trusted them”

(
Uchitel’skaia gazeta
, February 14, 1946). The notion of faith was connected to that of trust. A speaker declared at the vast nomination meeting at Moscow’s Elektrozavod plant at the start of the campaign: “Comrade Stalin,

with his love for the Motherland, for his people, his indefatigable energy

and care for the needs of the workers, has justified our faith—the faith of

the voters—in his role as a deputy of the people” (
Pravda
, January 3, 1946).

Rhetorical inconsistencies and the observable absence of rights in

everyday life were unpromising enough, but the campaign also suffered

from practical failures. Was an election campaign an unpromising arena for

the inculcation of a particular rhetoric? To be fair, the task was immense

and the post-war circumstances of extreme deprivation imposed practical

hindrances and elevated popular skepticism or confusion.18 Regime rheto-

ric was unlikely to obtain even a superficial purchase among the population

when electoral campaigning was extremely ineffective in some areas of the

country. This left some people badly educated in the language and con-

cepts that the Party-government wanted the election campaign to impart.

A confidential report on Voronezh
oblast’
(province) showed that some

——————

18 For post-war misery and “state-society” relations, see Zubkova 1998.

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77

villages were entirely neglected by agitators, while, in others, the propa-

ganda effort comprised nothing more than an activist “reading out the

electoral rules, two articles of the constitution, and all of a speech by Com-

rade Molotov”, which officials understood as being unlikely to engage the

audience of tired peasants (Zubkova 2003, 396). Welfare rights, protected

by the constitution, made little sense when the level of well-being was so

low, and when agitators could not explain the situation. A confidential

report that summarized voters’ responses and questions at small election

meetings throughout the country showed widespread dissatisfaction with

the provision of welfare and local facilities. One voter asked, “Why is there

no care for people’s everyday needs in Troitsk? The whole municipal

economy is in ruins.” Another wondered: “When are residents of Nov-

gorod going to be moved out of holes in the ground and basements?”

(Zubkova 2003, 403–4). In the end, rights did not exist in the Stalinist

dictatorship and the election campaign of 1946 could not invent them.

Conclusion

Election talk is often cheap. In conventional democracies, as parties and

candidates compete with each other, they exaggerate the generosity of their

policies, or scaremonger about their opponents, or deliberately ignore the

issues that actually concern them most. The language of election cam-

paigns in twentieth century dictatorships also seems pitiful, re-circulating

slogans and clichés, reheating a leader cult, offering gigantically ambitious

formulae for insoluble problems. Yet this rhetoric gave citizens the chance

to understand the Party on its own terms. Controlling the media and the

campaign agenda completely, not needing to deal with an opposition or to

concern itself with unpredictable political weather, the leading Party could

communicate its ideas of choice in a clear and uncluttered way, offering

ready-made rhetorical strategies that the population could learn and repeat.

The 1946 campaign for elections to the Supreme Soviet displayed these

characteristics. Central to its aims was the reassertion of the legitimacy of

Party and government—and indeed of the whole Soviet project—follow-

ing the test of the war. It sought to achieve this by exploiting the dynamics

of popular sovereignty and constitutional normality in order to present its

principal campaign messages in a relentless and even total performance.

78

M A R K B . S M I T H

These messages were very particular to the time: they focused on victory in

the war, the personality of Stalin, and—the theme analyzed in this chap-

ter—the rights that were part of the 1936 constitution. But the campaign

failed on the last of these. The gap between rhetoric and reality was too

stark, while the rhetorical message that sought to bridge it was too con-

fused for people to internalize and make use of on a widespread scale.

They would only do so after Stalin’s death, and then only thanks to con-

crete social and political reforms rather than electoral rhetoric. In the end,

Soviet democracy’s essence of popular sovereignty and would-be modern

constitutional rights undermined the coherence of the campaign, as it

would do again later in the Soviet period. The 1946 election makes clear

why a pseudo-democratic process was essential for Soviet rule, just as it

demonstrates that it was a weak technology for the exercise of dictatorial

power.

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