Elections in Soviet Union?

[MellowViper]

I always was under the impression they were some type of dictatorship, but I read that in 1991, a referendum was held, and the majority of people in 9 out of 15 of the Soviet states voted to keep the country intact. I really don't know how democracy worked there. I just thought it was a type of dictatorship. They say it was a 1 party system, but I think US democracy is really a 1 party system with 2 separate faction. I'd like to find out more about how their system worked.

[Born in the USSR]

I always was under the impression they were some type of dictatorship.... I just thought it was a type of dictatorship.

A dictatorship of what class,dude? - that is a point.

[PolishTrotsky]

Yeah, Under Stalin I believe they had elections. Deformed Wokers' State dictatorial elections, but elections all the same. Same thing under Kruschev, Brezhnev, etc.

[DaringMehring]

The elections were rigged, in the first instance by typical tactics - intimidation & pre-selecting slates to present only the favored people - and in the last instance, by falsifying votes. I have talked to someone who personally stuffed ballots in the USSR. This began at least as early as the Stalin period.

[ComradeOm]

HN Brailsford, a British journalist, gives an interesting account of Soviet elections in his very readable eyewitness account (http://www.marxists.org/history/archive/brailsford/1927/soviets-work/index.htm) of the country during the 1920s. The relevant chapter is here (http://www.marxists.org/history/archive/brailsford/1927/soviets-work/ch03.htm) and from the paragraph beginning "On the walls of the factory" (pg 34 in the paper edition) is an examination of how the official list of candidates was put together

The important context for this is that elections to Soviet bodies were, even in the late 1920s, essentially unimportant. These were primarily administrative roles, akin to local county councillor positions in the West, that came with no real political oversight or authority. If there was any real power at a higher level - which there wasn't given the subservience to the CP - well, the system was easily manipulated to ensure Communists secured the highest posts. Brailsford discusses the reality of national politics in a later chapter (http://www.marxists.org/history/archive/brailsford/1927/soviets-work/ch09.htm). The whole book is well worth a read

[Die Rote Fahne]

Free general elections? No.

[penguinfoot]

It's given that elections from 1929 onwards were single-candidate, even whilst there were suggestions that the 1937 ones would involve multiple candidates due to those elections taking place just after the promulgation of the new constitution, but at the same time, the fact that these elections were so limited in substantive terms should not lead us to uncritically accept some form of the totalitarianism thesis, or to assume that political life in the USSR was a straightforward process of the working population being dominated and having no input into the policy process whatsoever, because historians - including Fitzpatrick and others - have long emphasized that political life during the Stalin period in particular could often be highly complex, and that it was genuinely possible for workers to raise grievances and to have those grievances responded to by means of letters to newspapers and individual politicians, for example, these being highly traditional forms of political action but ones that also revealed some level of identification on the part of workers with the Soviet state, and that the discussions that were called around both the 1936 constitution and the draft laws relating to abortion in the same year were not without impact, even whilst participation was enforced, and the actual expression of views severely limited.

I do wonder, though, what was the extent of spoilage and abstention in the elections, and what do these indicators tell us?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I've had a burning wont to understand the nature of the Soviet electoral system, at a deeper level.

I think we can all accept that, generally speaking, USSR political elections were one candidate, Communist-led elections that weren't, in a liberal sense, 'fair'. I don't want to get onto the issue of 'dictatorship of the proletariat', as i'm not throwing around accusations of dictatorship here, that's not really my interest.

I wonder, more, how the system compares to somewhere like Cuba, where, through the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, there is a relatively vibrant grassroots democracy. Was this the case in the USSR, too, or was it simply a more centralised, top-down structure?

[penguinfoot]

Was this the case in the USSR, too, or was it simply a more centralised, top-down structure?

From my own knowledge, Soviet elections were top-down in the sense that the single candidate who was nominated for each position that was up for election was appointed by a higher body rather than by the people who would then go on to take part in the elections, and for most of the Stalinist period the same was true of party elections as well, except, interestingly, during the Great Purges, when candidates for party positions were not nominated above, as they had been in the past, but had to be nominated by the members who would otherwise be charged simply with assenting to the nominated candidate, so local party organs were basically given the task of going through the personal histories of potential candidates, including the incumbents, and coming up with a list of individuals who were suitable and sufficient in number to fill the positions that needed to be filled - my impression is that this was a highly stressful process for the party members concerned because they were likely to be the victims of persecution in the event that a nominated candidate was later identified as a victim of the purges.

As for Cuba, I recall that candidates for the national and provincial assemblies need to be accepted by candidacy commissions, so, as with Stalinism in the Soviet Union, there is the appearance of democracy, that serves to obscure an apparatus of bureaucratic rule.