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. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

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Deutschland 1933–1945. Das Dritte Reich. Handbuch zur
Geschichte
. Hanover: Fackelträger.

Elections in the Soviet Union, 1937–1989:

A View into a Paternalistic World from

Below

Stephan Merl

Elections in the Soviet Union were elections without choice. This was not

only a Western assessment, but perceived also by a lot of Soviet voters in

this manner. But why were elections held at all, and why was election day

celebrated as one of the big holidays in the Soviet calendar, right alongside

May 1 and November 7? Examining the importance and function of elec-

tions, one has to abandon Western conceptions of democracy, law and

civil rights. In addition, we should be very careful about connecting Soviet

elections with the term
modernization
. The function of elections changed profoundly with the adoption of the Stalin constitution in 1936. Elections

in the Soviet Union from that point on had to serve just two aims, which

were to control local officials on the one hand and to demonstrate the

unity of subjects and ruler on the other hand. It was based on a pre-mod-

ern concept of political culture, familiar to us as “the well-ordered police

state”, but no longer on the agenda in 20th century Western democracies.

The traditional Russian and Soviet version of this was the myth of the

Tsar: the wise and just ruler pursuing nothing else but the public and indi-

vidual welfare of his subjects, while a corrupt und incompetent administra-

tion obstructed him in doing so. Such an understanding was still shared by

the majority of the Russian people on the eve of the 20th century, and was

relatively easy to revive in 1936 (Merl 2010a).

The implications for the elections were significant. First, elections

aimed to unmask incompetent and corrupt officials. This was at the core of

Stalin’s understanding of “democracy”. Second, the subjects had to pay

reverence to the ruler. As it was unthinkable that any true Soviet citizen

could vote against the wise ruler, everybody in fact doing so excluded him-

self from the Soviet people and thus became subject to arrest and annihila-

tion. As opposed to any Western definitions of the sovereignty of the peo-

ple, Soviet elections from 1937 to the mid-1980s were, above all, a demon-

stration of the subordination of the whole people under the almighty ruler.

For fear of punishment, everybody felt obliged to take part in this event.

E L E C T I O N S I N T H E S O V I E T U N I O N , 1 9 3 7 – 1 9 8 9

277

Taking into account the fear of both, voters and local officials will help us

understand what really happened behind the scenes during the election

campaign. To protect themselves from repression, local officials and citi-

zens started to bargain in order to pursue their interests, i.e. the local au-

thorities to get the votes of the subjects and the voters to force the local

officials to take care of the people’s public and private welfare, as had been

promised by the “good Tsar”.

I will have to start with a closer look at the situation in the mid-1930s

and the fundamental changes the Stalin constitution wrought for the exe-

cution of the elections. In the second section, I will inquire about what the

elections meant for the voters, and how they could express and pursue

their wishes through participating. The third chapter will analyze the exe-

cution of the elections. What do we know about how the elections were

held in practice? What stood behind secret ballot, or voting for or against a

given candidate? The fourth part will look at a specific form of communi-

cation between regime and Soviet citizens in connection with the election:

the voters’ remarks on the ballots. In the final section I will summarize the

findings.

My contribution is based on nearly 40 years of archival work on elec-

tions in Russia and the Soviet Union, although I never paid special atten-

tion to this particular topic and perspective before. The interpretation

follows the attempt to understand the reasons as to why dictatorships

could win stability at least for some time, and the conviction that
political
communication
between subjects and ruler played a decisive role to this end.

Due to limits of space, I can only present my argument in the form of hy-

potheses and just give select illustrations of what they meant in practice.

The description makes use of material from local and central State and

Party archives, including the fund of the Central Election Commission for

the election of the Supreme Soviet, the reports of
oblast’
and Republic Party committees to the Central Committee, and local material on elections from

the Yaroslavl’
oblast’
.1

There is little profound research on Soviet elections seen from below at

this point. Due to the lack of choice and an incredibly high reported ap-

proval of the candidates, they were seen as fakes rather than as a serious

——————

1 Russian State Archive of New History, Moscow (RGANI), State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow (GARF), Russian State Economic Archive, Moscow (RGAE),

Center of Documentation of New History, Yaroslavl’ (TsDNIY), and State Archive of the Yaroslavl’
oblast’
(GAYO).

278

S T E P H A N M E R L

part of the political process. There are some descriptions of the legal foun-

dations of the elections and of their execution.2 From a judicial point of

view, there is hardly anything to add to the findings that the principles set

by the constitution were violated from the very beginning. Archival mate-

rial on the execution of the elections, accessible since the opening of the

archives in 1992, has hardly been used until today, although it reveals pub-

lic responses to the elections otherwise unknown. There are just two con-

tributions on the connection of the 1936 constitution and the new electoral

system from 1937 onwards (Getty 1991; Goldman 2005). While Arch

Getty focuses on the reasons why the secret ballot and the choice of can-

didates were established in the first place, and under which pressure

changes were made in preparation of the 1937 elections, Wendy Goldman

points out the close connection between the democracy campaign and

terror. In their study on popular turmoil, based on files of judicial investi-

gations, Kozlov and Mironenko (2005, 186–212) reveal the amount of

repression taking place in connection with the elections even from the

1950s onwards. While many of the available articles expand our knowledge

of how the elections took place, very few are stimulating for a better un-

derstanding of what was going on behind the scenes. Among them is the

article by Zaslavsky and Brym (1978), a first attempt to treat the question

of the functions of the elections based on interviews with emigrants.3 We

should keep their conclusion in mind: “Elections buttress the regime—not

by legitimizing it, but by prompting the population to show that the ille-

gitimacy of its ‘democratic’ practice has been accepted and that no action

to undermine it will be forthcoming” (Zaslavsky and Brym, 1978, 371).

——————

2 Cf. for example Roggemann (1973, 243–94) on the law on the election to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the law on the status of the Soviet deputies; (Wolters and Wolters 1977; Ritterband 1978; Jacobs 1971; Hough and Fainsod 1979, 315–19; Carson

1955).

3 The argument, however, suffers a little bit from a Muscovite perspective and does not stand up to an examination in all points.

E L E C T I O N S I N T H E S O V I E T U N I O N , 1 9 3 7 – 1 9 8 9

279

Political Circumstances of the Creation of the Election Regime

1936/1937: On the Connection of Terror and Democracy

The elections of the Soviets at different levels took place at different times

and thus, nearly annually. After the election of the Supreme Soviet of the

USSR and the Supreme Soviet of Nationalities for a legislative period of

initially four, and from 1974 five years, the election to the Supreme Soviet

of the Republics and their Supreme Soviet of Nationalities took place the

respective following year. Elections of the local, district and regional sovi-

ets were held every second year. After the introduction of the constitution

of 1936, the local peoples’ judges were also elected in a general vote. In

addition, the members of the social organizations such as unions, coopera-

tives, Komsomol and Party organs were elected at the grassroots level, just

as before 1936.4 Soviet election campaigns, lasting normally for two

months, took enormous efforts in mobilizing voters and propaganda.

To determine the importance of the elections, we have to look at the

actual power of the organs. In spite of its formal function as the supreme

organ of legislation at the level of the USSR or the republics, the Supreme

Soviets, convening only twice per year, were nothing but organs of accla-

mation. Controversial discussions did not take place.5 As the Supreme

Soviets lacked actual political power, the election of deputies into these

soviets before the beginning of
glasnost’
in 1987 had nothing to do with political decision-making. Local soviets, however, were organs of executive

power. They exercised administrative or repressive power over the popula-