Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (19 page)

Authors: Voting for Hitler,Stalin; Elections Under 20th Century Dictatorships (2011)

many countries in the world / But the Soviet country / On the great earth

/ Among all others—is unique! / Beyond the Soviet border, you can’t find

such a country / Where everybody can study / Where everybody can work

/ Where everybody is equal” (
Pionerskaia pravda
, February 12, 1946, 1). The election campaign was used as an intensive exercise during which children

might internalize the notion of Soviet rights. Success in this enterprise

seems improbable, but it is true that the generation that entered adulthood

during the Khrushchev era was quick to make use of the much greater

substance and practical utility that rights contained after 1953 (Smith

2009).

Published letters (from adults) to the press during the campaign spoke

the language of rights more fluently. Such published correspondence,

which might or might not have been entirely fictionalized, provided a tem-

plate for citizens’ private letters to the authorities, and showcased the kind

of language they might be expected to use in these and other formal trans-

actions with authority, and even in their everyday conversations. Many of

these letters, and indeed newspaper articles about the campaign, illustrated

these rights with the description of an ideal life trajectory, in which being

poor under arbitrary Tsarist rule gave way to living well under rights-based

Stalinist constitutionalism. Thus, one Professor A. Orlin described how his

father, a teacher, could hardly look after his family before the revolution,

while he, the son, enjoyed the comfort of student housing and a stipend

even while studying. “Soviet power opened for me, as for thousands of my

contemporaries, the doors to educational institutions”, Orlin enthused,

explaining his upward social mobility as the consequence of his rights.

“From the example of my life and the lives of my students”, he went on,

“one can judge what a wide right to education is possessed by every citizen

of the Soviet country. This right is written in gold letters in the Stalin con-

stitution.” Orlin described how voting for Stalin will now give him further

P O P U L A R S O V E R E I G N T Y A N D C O N S T I T U T I O N A L R I G H T S

joy (
Vecherniaia Moskva
, February 5, 1946). Similarly, O. F. Leonov, also an educationist, described her life path. “You [now] have considerable rights,

to work, to time off, to education,” she wrote. “I recall my own life, my

childhood and youth in pre-revolutionary times, of perpetual, joyless life

and great need. Only Soviet power gave me the chance to become a

teacher” (
Vecherniaia Moskva
, February 6, 1946). Adopting the same structure, a citizen, I. Nikolaev, wrote of his pre-revolutionary misery: “I am 62.

I well remember my unhappy childhood. All our family lived on the

wretched wages of my father, who worked on the railways. We all huddled

together in a small room.” His contrasting experience since 1917 had partly

been defined by rights and by the possibility to vote for the great hero,

Stalin:

Soviet power is our people’s power. It has brought people out of beggary and lack of rights. My brothers, sisters and I live in good houses, not needing for anything.

My youngest brother received a higher education and became an engineer. My

salary is nine hundred rubles a month. Apart from that, in view of my age, the state pays a pension. In 1933 the government made me a hero of labor. As a resident of the Stalinskii electoral district I will have the honor to vote on 10 February for our first candidate for deputy of the Supreme Soviet USSR, Comrade Stalin. I am

awaiting this day as a great festival (
Vecherniaia Moskva
, February 5, 1946).

The Failure of Rights During the Campaign

The election campaign publicized this approach to rights and showed peo-

ple how to deploy its language.13 Nonetheless, the constitutional existence

of rights, and their repeated emphasis in public culture, was not reflected in

the realities of daily life. Not only did rights have no substantive meaning

in a polity that remained arbitrary, but some people openly acknowledged

this, either disputing the existence of rights or simply not using the official

language. Ordinary people sometimes expressed concerns about their po-

litical rights, about the problem of what electing a single candidate could

possibly mean, and about the way that political structures were or were not

consistent with their description in the constitution. In the lead-up to the

1946 election campaign, a worker at the First State Ball Bearing Factory,

Comrade Martynovskii, commented in a private conversation that “the

——————

13 As Stephen Kotkin (1995) has it, how to “speak Bolshevik”.

M A R K B . S M I T H

elections don’t serve any public interest. The Party chooses the candidates,

and we vote for them.” He concluded: “There’s a lot of talk about true

democracy in our country, but we don’t have it in practice” (Kiselev 2000,

105). Workers asked about the single-candidate problem at meetings: “Is it

not a breach of democracy to nominate just one candidate in an electoral

district?” (Ibid.). Comrade Kuznetsov, an engineer at the same factory,

declared in late 1945 (just before the campaign started, but during the pe-

riod of “preparation” for it, when the authorities were listening): “in our

country, the rights of voters have been pinched […] the majority of depu-

ties elected to the Supreme Soviet in 1937 have not reported back to the

voters on their work” (Ibid., 104). Around the same time, Comrade Zhark-

ovich commented in a private conversation among co-workers at the Stalin

Car Works that, “According to the constitution, all citizens of the USSR

have the right to an education. But in actual fact that right is not properly

implemented.” She described her own case: “I, for example, wanted to

enroll at a theater college, but they wouldn’t release me from the plant. I

thought about leaving anyway, but I was afraid of the courts” (Ibid.). A

worker called Andreev told the Party organization at his plant that the

housing rights of those returning from the front or from evacuation had

been “breached” (Ibid.). Abrekov, who worked at Moscow’s Central Tele-

graph, argued in December 1945 that there was no point in voting, as

deputies would not restore the right to move freely to a new place of work

(Ibid., 110).

Other people, however, simply ignored the language of rights. This was

not surprising, given that language could not create rights where none

existed in reality. Yet, this was not just a consequence of a glaring empirical

inconsistency, but also of a rhetorical confusion at the heart of the cam-

paign. This confusion was ultimately associated with the mixed message

embodied in the electoral process of 1946: that popular sovereignty, ac-

cording to which the whole population expressed, through the genius of

Stalin, its general will, was overlaid with the notion that the Soviet political system was governed by a constitution that protected the rights of individual Soviet citizens. While the categories of popular sovereignty and

constitutionalism should have been reconciled in the Soviet order, voters

naturally had little success in absorbing a notion so fanciful and distant

from their bitter post-war struggles.

Citizens could hardly be expected to internalize even the rhetoric of

rights when the election campaign also constructed the rhetoric of grati-

P O P U L A R S O V E R E I G N T Y A N D C O N S T I T U T I O N A L R I G H T S

tude and gift.14 Having things by right and being given them as gifts stand,

of course, in opposition to each other. This rhetorical scheme made the

election an arena in which the Soviet people expressed their thanks for the

great things that Stalin had given them. High among these was the 1936

constitution and its range of rights. An article in Moscow’s popular eve-

ning newspaper about hero-mothers—those who had given birth to several

children and who were entitled to special help from state agencies, and

who received particular attention during the election campaign—declared

shortly before the election: “Only in our Soviet country is such care for the

family possible. The Stalin constitution gave us all this” (
Vecherniaia Moskva
, February 1, 1946, 2). The same newspaper ran a feature the following week

headlined: “The heartfelt gratitude of Soviet women to the great Stalin”

(
Vecherniaia Moskva
, February 9, 1946, 2). Petitioning the authorities (often their Supreme Soviet deputy) in their desperation to obtain basic goods

amid catastrophic shortages, people more often mimicked these rhetorical

constructions and not the countervailing talk of rights. Evidence of many

different forms of popular language exists, of course, and seeking a deci-

sive conclusion about the most typical mode of popular expression is

methodologically misguided, however broad the base of evidence, but

archival research shows that the following examples are at least common.

When Professor A. P. Kreshkov eventually obtained extra housing space in

1946 (in line with the law) because some of his work inevitably had to take

place at home, he wrote to Georgii Malenkov, the Supreme Soviet deputy

and Politburo member who had helped him: “From all of my soul I thank

you for your attention.”15 People pleaded with their Supreme Soviet depu-

ties for a better life, subordinating themselves to power and circumventing