Stalin and Democratic Reforms in the USSR

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

So over on r/Communism101 and r/Communism there are those who claim that, in the 1930s, Stalin and the Party attempted to implement a more radically democratic Soviet constitution. Almost all of them refer to an essay by Grover Furr (who I frankly do not trust).

So my question is: Is there any evidence outside of Furr that suggests that Stalin was attempting to bring more Democratic reforms to the Soviet Union?

[John Nada]

Oh Marx, Furr's fucking out there.:lol: Like he goes out of his way to.

Haven't read Khrushchev Lied! yet, though from what I've read from the "Secret Speech" showed Khrushchev was just a self-serving opportunist("Stalin did all this fuck up shit and singlehandedly fuck up the country, but I was just too busy kissing ass moving up the ranks to stop it":rolleyes:), but fuck.

I do remember reading something, might of been something written by Getty, where Stalin did take the new Soviet constitution seriously. IIRC, he ask for mass debates on it. But much to his and many in the parties surprise, most worker and peasants seemed more concerned with economic concerns such as pensions, than political right. Many didn't understand what a secret ballot was(one person thought it meant the candidates were secret), which was something Stalin thought was important. This is just by memory, could be wrong.

I think Groover Furr bases his theory that Stalin wanted a more far-reaching Constitution from this interview:
We shall probably adopt our new constitution at the end of this year. The commission appointed to draw up the constitution is working and should finish its labours soon. As has been announced already, according to the new constitution, the suffrage will be universal, equal, direct and secret.

You are puzzled by the fact that only one party will come forward at elections. You cannot see how election contests can take place under these conditions. Evidently candidates will be put forward not only by the Communist Party, but by all sorts of public, non-Party organisations. And we have hundreds of these. We have no contending parties any more than we have a capitalist class contending against a working class which is exploited by the capitalists.

Our society consists exclusively of free toilers of town and country - workers, peasants, intellectuals.

Each of these strata may have its special interests and express them by means of the numerous public organisations that exist. But since there are no classes, since the dividing lines between classes have been obliterated, since only a slight, but not a fundamental, difference between various strata in socialist society has remained, there can be no soil for the creation of contending parties. Where there are not several classes there cannot be several parties, for a party is part of a class.

Under National-"Socialism" there is also only one party. But nothing will come of this fascist one party system. The point is that in Germany, capitalism and classes have remained, the class struggle has remained and will force itself to the surface in spite of everything, even in the struggle between parties which represent antagonistic classes, just as it did in Spain, for example. In Italy there is also only one party, the Fascist Party. But nothing will come of it there for the same reasons.

Why will our suffrage be universal? Because all citizens, except those deprived of the franchise by the courts, will have the right to elect and be elected.

Why will our suffrage be equal? Because neither differences in property (which still exist to some extent) nor racial or national affiliation will entail either privilege or disability. Women will enjoy the same rights to elect and be elected as men. Our suffrage will be really equal.

Why secret? Because we want to give Soviet people complete freedom to vote for those they want to elect, for those whom they trust to safeguard their interests.

Why direct? Because direct elections to all representative institutions, right up to the supreme bodies, will best of all safeguard the interests of the toilers of our boundless country. You think that there will be no election contests.

But there will be, and I foresee very lively election campaigns. There are not a few institutions in our country which work badly. Cases occur when this or that local government body fails to satisfy certain of the multifarious and growing requirements of the toilers of town and country. Have you built a good school or not? Have you improved housing conditions?

Are you a bureaucrat? Have you helped to make our labour more effective and our lives more cultured?

Such will be the criteria with which millions of electors will measure the fitness of candidates, reject the unsuitable, expunge their names from candidates' lists, and promote and nominate the best.

Yes, election campaigns will be very lively, they will be conducted around numerous, very acute problems, principally of a practical nature, of first class importance for the people. Our new electoral system will tighten up all institutions and organisations and compel them to improve their work. Universal, direct and secret suffrage in the U.S.S.R. will be a whip in the hands of the population against the organs of government which work badly. In my opinion our new Soviet constitution will be the most democratic constitution in the world.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm

[Prof. Oblivion]

The new Soviet constitution was implemented in 1936 which implemented universal suffrage and removed voting restrictions. However, at the same time it had a provision calling the Soviet Communist Party the leading party and was used to ban other parties and factions.

Following the new constitution, elections were held in 1937. Originally going to be multi-candidate elections, this was reversed and only single candidate elections were held ("for" or "against"). This was probably due to the continuing anarchy of the Great Terror. In any case, the election was fairly subdued because of this and the arrest of candidates who still attempted to run on a multi-candidate basis.

However, in government bodies there was continued dissent. From Everyday Stalinism by Fitzpatrick:


But popular feistiness was not totally absent. There were cases of objection to the official nominees, especially those who were central politicians and celebrities. In Kuibyshev (Central Volga), there were objections to the candidacy of a Ukrainian for the Soviet of Nationalities (upper house of the Supreme Soviet): "Let the Ukraine elect him, and we will put forward our own [Russian] candidate." In Leningrad, objections were voiced to the candidacies of Mikoyan (on grounds of his "dissipated personal life"), Kalinin ("too old"), and the writer Aleksei Tolstoy ("really fat"). In Novosibirsk, one pre-election meeting even objected to Stalin's candidacy, on the grounds that he was standing for nomination in many constituencies; instead, the candidacy of Alekseev, Novosibirsk party secretary was proposed - and passed by a vote of 150, as against 50 for Stalin.

However, to think of the elections as more "democratic" is clearly untrue. Further in the book, Fitzpatrick outlines the candidate selection process internally for party elections, and the problems inherent in such a task during the Great Terror:


Another scapegoating mechanism was the re-election of party officers called for in the name of "party democracy" at the February-March plenum of the Central Committee. The label sounded innocuous, but every party secretary present must have recognized it as part of the complex of threats to his security that were offered on that occasion. It must be remembered that, in normal circumstances, "party democracy," like "soviet democracy," existed only as a fiction. The convention in both contexts was that elections were essentially uncontested; the candidates were nominated according to lists sent down from a higher authority, which were then duly confirmed by voting. When it became clear in the spring of 1937 that party elections under the rubric of "party democracy" meant that there would be no lists, that was a major shock, and not a welcome one. On what basis were candidates for party office to be selected if the central party organs refused to indicate whom they favored? In a context where more Communist officials were being unmasked as "enemies of the people" every day, how could one avoid the ultimate horror of electing someone who turned out to be an enemy (which meant showing oneself to be an enemy-by-association)?

The party elections proceeded slowly and with great difficulty. In the absence of lists, each candidate had to be discussed individually and the presumption was that at least some of the candidates - notably those who were incumbents - would be unmasked as enemies in the course of the discussion. The incumbent officers were understandably intimidated and paralyzed; the rank and file often showed little inclination to take the initiative into their own hands. Sometimes there was difficulty getting the show off the ground at all because nobody wanted to speak; some elections lasted for weeks. At one Iaroslavl plant, for example, the 800 members of the factory party organization attended meetings every evening for more than a month before they managed to elect a new committee.

The party elections were no simple matter in the Ministry of Heavy Industry, where it took a week of careful weighing of eighty candidacies to produce a list of eleven names. Some candidates were discredited in the course of discussion, among them the incumbent party secretary Andrei Zykov, who was alleged to have contacts with "Trotskyite counterrevolutionaries" and to have participated in a "leftist group" at the Institute of Red Professors in 1928-29. When Zykov failed to win reelection, that did not just mean he lost his job but also that he was in acute danger of being arrested as a counterrevolutionary, which was indeed his fate. The same fate awaited others criticized at the prolonged meetings at the Ministry: for example, Georgii Gvakhariia, head of the Makeevka metallurgical plant, whose definitive unmasking as an "enemy" came only a few weeks after he had been worked over in the forum.

This is clearly not democracy but a semblance of democracy.

[Prof. Oblivion]

I do remember reading something, might of been something written by Getty, where Stalin did take the new Soviet constitution seriously. IIRC, he ask for mass debates on it. But much to his and many in the parties surprise, most worker and peasants seemed more concerned with economic concerns such as pensions, than political right.

Fitzpatrick wrote about this in her book, too:


"Public discussion" (narodnoe obsuzhdenie) was an experiment that was tried twice, both times in 1936. The subjects were the abortion law and the new Constitution. It may have been part of an unsuccessful effort at democratization, as Arch Getty has argued, or simply a new form of information gathering about public opinion. In any case, it was not repeated. As we have seen in the case of the abortion debate, "public discussion" had many constraints. There was always the danger that the statement of unorthodox views would bring trouble from the NKVD. Moreover, the regime had stated its position at the beginning, with the publication of the draft law on abortion and the draft Constitution, and major changes were scarcely to be expected and did not in fact occur.

From the standpoint of the NKVD (and of later historians), however, the Constitution discussion was definitely worthwhile, for it generated a mass of useful information on popular opinion on a wide variety of topics, including some that were rarely addressed in other forums. This was not so much because people spoke up at the meetings as because they talked in the corridors (reported, as always, by the NKVD) and wrote large number of letters about the Constitution to newspapers and government agencies. These letters were summarized by the recipient agencies and sent up to the party leaders, according to standard procedure. In some cases, the summaries distinguished a special category of "hostile" comments.

Public discussion meant that meetings were organized at all workplaces, with attendance virtually compulsory. People often came to the meetings unwillingly and complained that the whole process was a waste of time. "The workers are all literate, they read the papers, there's nothing to discuss," workers at some Leningrad factories complained; some refused to attend the meetings. At the Maxim Gorky Weaving Plant in the Ivanovo region, management locked the doors and posted a guard beside them to prevent workers from leaving the meeting, which took place after work. This was deeply resented by the workers, most of whom were women with duties awaiting them at home. "You have posted a guard and are holding us by force," one woman protested. Another complained: "My children are left at home, and you don't let me out." This meeting went completely awry when a group of workers got past the guard by a ruse and "opened the doors with a shout," at which forty people immediately left,"Those who didn't manage to leave sat on the staircase and slept until the end."

[Die Neue Zeit]

However, to think of the elections as more "democratic" is clearly untrue. Further in the book, Fitzpatrick outlines the candidate selection process internally for party elections, and the problems inherent in such a task during the Great Terror:

This is clearly not democracy but a semblance of democracy.

That's a very shocking twist, to read about this aspect of Stalin's purges!

In other words, multi-candidate deliberations were used more specifically to out someone as an "enemy" than to actually put someone in the job. If multi-candidate deliberations were to have been used by later Soviet leaders after the denunciation of Stalin's purges, they would only have been used for the sake of shaming candidates for lesser scandals such as affairs (a la late Brezhnev), running an anti-corruption campaign (a la Andropov), or implementing a mass retirement scheme (a la Gorbachev).

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

To be fair, Colonel Gadaffi apparently took the writing the his little green book very seriously. To focus on the individual motivations of those who wield de facto dictatorial power misses the point, though. The focus is not on their individual choices but the structures of power within which they participate and benefit from.

Stalin could have had a heart of gold and spend nights awake thinking about how to make the most perfect, most democratic constitution in 1934. But the point is that he was doing this from a position of power and as such, his overriding - even if sub-conscious - motivations were based on his position of power, and thus were unlikely to have been much aligned to the needs and desires of the USSRs workers in the 1930s.

[Rafiq]

Stalin could have had a heart of gold and spend nights awake thinking about how to make the most perfect, most democratic constitution in 1934. But the point is that he was doing this from a position of power and as such, his overriding - even if sub-conscious - motivations were based on his position of power, and thus were unlikely to have been much aligned to the needs and desires of the USSRs workers in the 1930s.

This however begs the question: Was his "position of power" sufficient unto itself as an underlying motive? What were the implications of his "power", i.e. what did his power mean in relation to the Soviet state? It would be ridiculous, for example, to claim that Pinochet's underlying motivations, or actions had its basis in "his position of power". We know very well that Pinochet served capital - served the bourgeoisie.

With regard to Stalin, you have it quite backwards: Even if Stalin thought of himself as some kind of machiavellian manipulating his way into power (which is simply not true) - he still did not "hold power" in the sense that the state conformed to his will - for it is his will and identify which was conformed to his conditions. What is a "Stalin"? For a man who referred to himself in the third person, he knew very well that he was well beyond himself. It is in the process of thoroughly, ruthlessly and adamantly defending the Soviet state as conditions of its being gradually evolved that the degeneration occurred. We have no reason to think Stalin did not do this selflessly.