Soviet elections were very complicated entities, even during the period after Stalin's death. Although it was a one-party state and a highly authoritarian one at that, the Stalin Constitution of 1936 made both provisions for free elections and the Stalinist state staked a good deal of its legitimacy upon high turn-out during elections. The Stalin Constitution remained in force until 1977, when Brezhnev ordered a new constitution which was a document much like its predecessor.

Most Soviet citizens had to vote for delegates to the Supreme Soviet, the major parliamentary body in the USSR. Although both the 1936 and 1977 constitutions imbued the Supreme Soviet with broad, sweeping powers, in practice, the Supreme Soviet was a toothless rubber stamp for the choices of the executive. The constitutions allowed candidates from outside the Communist Party to stand for elections to the Supreme Soviet, but they usually had to be nominated or approved by their local Communist Party apparatus. There were detailed guidelines from Moscow about acceptable candidates and the state forbid adversarial electioneering campaigns. More often than not, voters usually had a choice of a single candidate, especially after the 1977 constitution. Elections were called by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet at regular scheduled intervals and took place in districts designated by the state.

This system led to an aspersion in the West that Soviet elections were "elections without choice," and there is a great deal of truth in this charge. However, this charge can obscure the inordinate degree of attention on Soviet regime lavished upon elections. The Stalin Constitution nominally provided for a secret ballot and a degree of candidates and the state used high electoral turnout to legitimize the grand Soviet experiment. The 1977 constitution also decreed an election's results to be invalid if turn out was low. High turnout was also a means of social control by the state as elections verified that the voter was a legal resident of a particular area. Therefore, local officials were often under intense pressure to guarantee a high political turnout for both propaganda and practical purposes. This was one of the reasons why voter turnout in the USSR typically averaged in the eightieth percentile from 1937 onward.

While many local CP officials fudged the numbers of turnout, this was a dangerous stratagem for the apparatchik if caught. Like political bosses in the West, these local officials preferred to employ various inducements to get voters to the polls. From the Second World War onward, Soviet elections increasingly assumed a holiday-like atmosphere to attract voters. Similarly, mobile voting booths were often used to make sure that infirm voters could cast their ballots. The intense pressure from the center on these local officials to deliver the numbers gave the Soviet voter leverage in which abstaining from voting gave the voter a degree of power. Voting against a candidate, such as scratching out the name, was an embarrassment to the local CP officials and detrimental to their careers. The various meetings in the run-up for Soviet elections were often a time when the public could petition the officials for local improvements, repair of infrastructure, and airing other grievances. There was also a pronounced uptick in petitions and other requests to the electoral officials and newspapers during election season and some of these entreaties included the threat that if they were not met by election day, these individuals would boycott the election. By the same token, some Soviet voters would sometimes write petitions on the ballots to the authorities. Some of these preserved ballots have patriotic slogans, but others contained personal requests or denunciations of local officials.

Although Soviet elections were not democratic in any formal meaning of the word, they were an anemic channel for political communication between the state and its citizens. Over the long-term, these "elections without choice," did foster an apathy over the Soviet system and its many hypocrisies, but they did also provide a mechanism to cope with the grim reality of a single-party state. Even without any real electoral choice, many Soviet citizens recognized that there was some degree of power in the act of voting and bargained with local officials accordingly.

Sources

Jessen, Ralph, and Hedwig Richter. Voting for Hitler and Stalin: Elections Under 20th Century Dictatorships. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011.

Sakwa, Richard. Soviet Politics in Perspective. London: Routledge, 1998