Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (84 page)

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were to function as seismographs of potential unrest, while normal citizens

in their turn were at least able to combine their willingness to go to the

polls with demands for the remedy of local grievances.14

As for the conduct of the elections, the focus of researchers was on

turnout and voting: although the latter was not an official duty and no

immediate sanctions for refusal to cast one’s vote had become known, the

convention was thought to have been to attend a polling station in the

morning (Friedgut 1979, 115; White 1985, 222). It was the responsibility of

the agitators, who thought nothing of making phone calls or dropping in

on people at their homes, to mobilize election-weary voters (Mote 1965;

77–78; Friedgut 1979, 114). The discrepancy between the number of peo-

ple with the right to vote and the actual votes registered was accounted for

in two ways. Illegal persons in big cities were believed not to have been on

the electoral rolls because they had not been registered. People in the cities,

on the other hand, were believed to have made increasing use of the possi-

bility of applying to the relevant electoral committee to excuse them from

voting in one precinct and requesting certification of their right to vote in

another one, but in the event did not go to the other polling station to

vote.15 According to estimates by US observers, polling booths were at-

tended by less than 5 per cent of all voters in 1958 and by up to 10 per

cent in 1963 (Friedgut 1979, 112; Mote 1965, 81). In principle, it is argued,

handing in one’s ballot paper unmarked was tantamount to expressing

one’s approval. Only the complete scratching out of a candidate’s name

was counted as a “no” vote, while an invalid vote was only recorded when

the ballot was exchanged. Manipulations on the part of electoral commit-

tees, it was said, took the form of accepting proxy votes, the ex post facto

deletion of people refusing to vote from the electoral rolls and the re-

cording of fictive votes (Friedgut 1979, 115–117).

With regard to election results, Sovietologists wondered whether it was

permissible to consider “the missing one per cent” a criterion for election

refusal. The categories of “individual dissent” and “collective dissent” were

——————

14 Mote estimates the number of domestic visits by agitators in the Leningrad elections of 1963 at 10 communal apartments or 20 to 30 families (Mote 1965, 66). According to Friedgut, in the 1970s agitators paid visits to between 30 and 40 voters at their homes (Friedgut 1979, 99).

15 Zaslavsky and Brym claim that in the Soviet Union of the 1970s as many as a quarter of the electorate regularly did not vote in elections (Zaslavsky and Brym 1978, 365). White, by contrast, assumes that the share of non-voters increased from 2–3 per cent in the 1950s to only 5.4 per cent in 1975 (White 1985, 223–224).

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applicable only to local elections in which, in contrast to elections at the

Union and Republic levels, it was possible now and then, with a probability

of c. 1:10,000 according to official figures, for candidates to be rejected.

Abstentions and “no” votes in cities were attributed to the miserable socio-

economic conditions and were regarded as individual protests. Only in the

depths of the countryside and under conditions of face-to-face communi-

cation, it was argued, had group dissent been able to unfold, which from

time to time had culminated in the rejection of an unpopular candidate

(Gilison 1968, 822–823).

Given these pre-conditions, Soviet elections must be understood as ex-

pressions of a paternalistic culture and as ritualistic demonstrations of

loyalty.16 As regards their political importance, elections came a distant

second behind the Party Congresses—this at least is suggested by the rela-

tively modest response that election campaigns met with in the media and

the correspondingly low perception on the part of the people (Friedgut

1979, 73; 1983, 115). Dissent was easiest to articulate through an election

boycott.

The Political and Social Situation on the Eve

of the 1958 Elections

After this general survey of the Soviet electoral system, some insight into

the practice of elections will be offered in what follows, using the example

of the 1958 elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.17 The focus will

first be on the general political and social condition of the Soviet Union

and then on the specific situation of the Belarusian capital Minsk. The

latter will be reconstructed using articles in the official press as well as

internal Party reports.

The power struggle among Josef Stalin’s successors was characterized

by the debate about two different views of social and economic policy. In

August 1953, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR

Georgii M. Malenkov announced a “new course”, declaring that following

the achievement of forced industrialization the raising of living standards

——————

16 Cf. the personal report about the 1963 elections in Leningrad in Mote (1965, 28–29).

17 For the election procedure in the BSSR in the 1960s cf. Shabanov (1969), Hill (1976).

For the 1970s see Leizerov (1981).

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

should now be placed on the agenda. To intensify agricultural production,

kolkhoz
members were to be given incentives. Although Nikita S. Khrushchev, in his role as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet

Union, subsequently adopted this new course in part, he stood in principle

for a different concept, that of changing the existing
kolkhoz
economies into large enterprises and of combining increases in production with restrictions on the private farm economy. Announced in the spring of 1954,

the success of the reclaimed land campaign from the steppe areas, although

temporary, secured him a leading position in the Party. Against this back-

drop Khrushchev, in the teeth of opposition from his rivals, was able to

put on the agenda of the 20th Party Congress in February 1956 “overcom-

ing the personality cult”. What he basically wanted to achieve was to stabi-

lize the existing power structure and to blame Stalin in person for all the

mistakes of the past. Later measures with which he laid the foundations of

“welfare communism” met with popular approval whereas the reorganiza-

tion of the administration of the economy of May 1957 turned out to be a

risk: a mere month later, his opponents, trying to capitalize on the dissatis-

faction of the Party cadres, put the replacement of the First Secretary on

the agenda of the Party Presidium. However, as Khrushchev had the sup-

port not merely of the regional Party secretaries but in addition that of the

army, he managed to eliminate at an extraordinary plenary meeting the so-

called “Anti-Party group”. In this context also, Malenkov was stripped of

all his state and Party offices (Merl 2002; Pyzhikov 2002; Taubman 2003).

It was only after the Second World War that the Belarusian Socialist

Soviet Republic (BSSR), in the framework of a Soviet reconstruction pro-

gram, entered on a phase of rapid industrialization and urbanization, with

all of the country’s resources concentrated in its capital Minsk. In the years

1947–50, the factories for lorries, two-wheeled vehicles and tractors were

started up, which turned Minsk into a center of the Soviet automobile

industry. These were the conditions under which the number of people

living in Minsk doubled from quarter-of-a-million in 1950 to half-a-million

in 1959. This development brought a genuine exchange of population in its

wake: in the Holocaust, Minsk lost the character of a Jewish
shtetl
, which it had preserved up to the 1920s, while, on the other hand, the organized

recruitment of labor from the countryside and the influx of apprentices

from the provinces effected a peasantization of urban society. The new

formation of the “socialist city”, actively pursued until the mid-1950s, was

accompanied by manifold contradictions. While the Minsk town center, for

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example, was given a triumphalist neo-classicist architecture, the residential

quarters suffered from a lack of infrastructure. As factories had to focus all

their energy on meeting the production quota of the economic plan, they

could not fulfill their obligations in residential construction. Thus it was

that the great mass of the population underwent social misery on a scale

that was reminiscent of the conditions of the “capitalist city”, as described

by Marx and Engels (Bohn 2008).

In the lead-up to the elections to the Supreme Soviet, there were three

events that attracted people’s attention: the ratification of a house building

program in July 1957, the launching of a sputnik into space in October of

the next year and the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the October

Revolution that same November. Less spectacular, but no less incisive, was

the change of direction in agricultural policy, for which Khrushchev tried

to win approval on the occasion of a visit to Minsk in mid-January 1958.

For one thing, a campaign was launched against the private keeping of

livestock, for another the dissolution of the machine-and-tractor stations

was begun. The former measure implied the displacement of private agri-

culture, the latter involved the threat of future financial deficits for the

kolkhozes
.18

The Minsk Campaign for the Elections to the Supreme Soviet

When on January 4 and 5, 1958 the Belarusian local paper
Minskaia prauda

(“Minsk Truth”) and the official Russian-language government daily news-

paper
Sovetskaia Belorussiia
(“Soviet Belarus”) rang in the campaign for the elections to the Supreme Soviet, the construction of communism was

mentioned, but specific political issues played no role.19 Rather, the press’s

job seemed to be reduced to informing the voters about the election pro-

——————

18 Khrushchev had paid Minsk a visit on January 19, 1958 in order to take part in a consultation meeting of the top workers in Belarusian agriculture and to receive the tributes of the worker masses in Lenin Square (January 24). Cf. Sovetskaia Belorussiia (henceforward SB) 17, 21.1.1958, 1; SB 18, 22.1.1958, 1; SB 20, 24.1.1958, 1–2; SB 21, 25.1.1958, 1–3; SB 22, 26.1.1958, 1–3. Cf. also the corresponding reports in the Minskaia prauda (hereafter MP) of January 21–28, 1958.