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“The People’s Voice”: The Elections to the

Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1958 in the

Belarusian Capital Minsk1

Thomas M. Bohn

In the mid-1970s, a short story about “elections” in the Soviet provinces

appeared in the Russian-language literary magazine
Grani
(“Facets”), published in Frankfurt am Main, as part of the so-called
tamizdat
(“There-

Literature”).2 It was written in the style of a
skaz
(“something told”), a narrative mode in which a hero from the people tells an adventure in everyday colloquial language, establishing in the process a special type of

communication with the reader. Assuming the role of chauffeur, the nar-

rator reveals a bitter insight in the very first sentence of his “election”

story: “If you don’t have a drink when you can, you’re a fool.” This view is

bitter, not wise, because the narrator pretends that, right up until the

fateful events of that election Sunday, he had meant to free himself of his

drink problem. Briefly, his story is this: in contrast to the other members

of his collective, the tragic hero spurns the obligatory buffet meal after

casting his vote, and walking upright, starts on his way home. At the same

time, and this is the decisive turning point of the story, the relevant Party

committee is informed that the people of a village somewhere in the steppe

are refusing to vote as a protest against the misappropriation of their

church. As his colleagues are of no use after their morning drinks, the

narrator is ordered to take an inspector to the rebellious village. After a

number of adventures on the way, they finally get to the village only to find

that the local election committee has already solved the problem by

dumping all the papers unceremoniously into the ballot box. At the end of

his report, the narrator joins again the millions of people who see elections

——————

1 An earlier version of this article was published as: Thomas M. Bohn: “Im allgemeinen Meer der Stimmen soll auch meine Stimme erklingen …” Die Wahlen zum Obersten

Sowjet der UdSSR von 1958—Loyalität und Dissens im Kommunismus. In: Geschichte

und Gesellschaft 34 (2008), 524–549.

2 Unofficial term for banned writings that were published outside the borders of the USSR.

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T H O M A S M . B O H N

for what they really are: a public festival. “Since then I’ve been drinking

again,” is the narrator’s disillusioned conclusion (Zinov’ev 1976).3

The reference to this story is meant to provide a counterweight to re-

search during the Cold War period, which regarded the familiar “elections

without choice”, i.e. non-competitive elections with only one candidate per

constituency and an approval rate of nearly 100 per cent, as unworthy of its

attention. Working on this premise, scholars would mention, at best, the

system-stabilizing function of mobilizing the masses and the Party mem-

bership, and the demonstration of power (Friedgut 1979, 137; Hahn 1988,

93). The present essay, however, takes a different approach in that its in-

terest is directed towards areas of public life in societies of the Soviet type

that permitted the articulation of dissent and in which manifestations of

immunity (“Resistenz”) could go unpunished. These forms of behavior are

the obverse of what elections in state socialism were actually meant to

provide—a means for the regime to reassure itself of the people’s loyalty.

What may serve as a heuristic for the explanation of the room for maneu-

vering between the relevant options is the category of self-will (“Eigen-

sinn”). To explore the potential of these terminological tools, some

definitions will be given first (section I). These are followed by the history

of the Soviet elections, presented, in contrast to the example quoted above

from the underground literature, in the language used by scholars. The

point is however that by using a fascinating new source—comments on

ballot papers—this article will try to do justice to the heterogeneous and

often unappreciated voices of the people. The article will proceed in three

steps: the first will describe the development of the Soviet electoral system

(II.), while the second discusses the perspective of Western research during

the Cold War (III.). The third, finally, will use an exemplary case to recon-

struct the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 1958 on the

basis of archival materials, and will distinguish between the political and

social background (IV.), the election campaign (V.) and the actual voting

(VI.). It is the thesis advanced in the present essay that both comments on

ballot papers, though apparently of little relevance in quantitative terms,

and petitions, submitted in great numbers to the various agencies of state

and Party, are highly informative sources for the exploration of communi-

cations between the people and the authorities and as such reflect the

whole range of public opinion, from identification with the social welfare

——————

3 The pseudonymous author is Isaak Schapiro, an engineer who had emigrated from the eastern Ukraine to Israel in the early 1970s.

“ T H E P E O P L E ’ S V O I C E ” : E L E C T I O N S T O T H E S U P R E M E S O V I E T

311

dictatorship to the questioning of the political regime.4 A final section

(VII.) will make a few suggestions on open research questions.

Categories of Resistant Behavior in Communism

For a long time, research on the Soviet Union took its inspiration from

Hannah Arendt’s thesis that the Stalinist as well as the National Socialist

dictatorships had led to the “atomization of society” (Plaggenborg 2006,

221–222). This view held that communitization received a renewed

impetus only after the emergence of the dissident intelligentsia, which was

able to develop in the conditions of a cultural “thaw” under Nikita S.

Khrushchev (Alexeyeva 1985; Beyrau 1993; Kulavig 2002; Stephan 2005).

Employing the perspective of the history of everyday life, Moshe Lewin

has propounded the thesis that Soviet society, due to the flight from the

countryside and worker migration during the drives for industrialization of

the 1930s and 1960s, constituted itself as a “quicksand society”, which was

not easy to bring under the control of the authorities.5 It should be noted,

in this context, that the social protests of the post-Stalinist era, and the

hunger revolt of Novocherkassk in 1962 in particular, have repeatedly

attracted the attention of researchers (Schlögel 1984; Baron 2001; Kozlov

2002, 2006). Accordingly, after the opening of the archives the mood of

the Soviet people and the development of public opinion during the de-

Stalinization period became a significant topic of historical research

(Zubkova 1998, 2000; Grushin 2001, 2003–2006; Aksiutin 2004). Reacting

to dissonances, so runs Victor Zaslavsky’s stimulating thesis, the regime

under Leonid I. Brezhnev made the attempt to involve the people via “an

organized mass consensus” and thus score at least an indirect success. As

long as the Socialist welfare state, announced in the Party program of 1961,

guaranteed jobs and stable prices, “withdrawal into the private sphere” was

an increasingly attractive proposition for people in the Soviet Union

(Zaslavsky 1994). Indeed, the dichotomy between the private and the pub-

lic spheres, which led in Socialist political systems to schizophrenic be-

——————

4 On submissions to the authorities see the volumes of sources by Livshin and Orlov (1998) and Livshin et al. (2001) as well as the comprehensive survey by Mommsen

(1987) and the quintessence of the research on Stalinism by Alexopoulos (2003).

5 See Lewin (1985, 1991a, 1991b).

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havioral patterns, has been described by a number of scholars (Shlapentokh

1989; Rittersporn, 2003).

Against this backdrop, the time has come to employ new categories in

the analysis of non-conformism or dissent in the Soviet Union. As it is the

actions of ordinary people that are the subject of what follows, the phe-

nomenon of intellectual dissidence, well-researched though it is, will be left

out of consideration in this contribution.6 Before I discuss “immunity” and

“self-will”, two terms that have been tested in research on National Social-

ism and the GDR, as alternative analytical tools, I want to explore, by way

of a foil, the concept of “loyalty”, which has been tested in recent years in