Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (22 page)

through which public support for the government is demonstrated; “im-

pression management”, by which a democratic facade is built; “preference

falsification”, meaning an attempt to create a widespread belief that every-

one is favorable towards the regime; and, finally, an “accommodation

function”, by which promises to share the spoils of office with one’s sup-

——————

6 For example, about 47 per cent of the RSFSR population was under 25 in 1959: Tsentral’noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie (1963).

7 One exception is a recent dissertation by Benjamin Tromly, which examines the education of elite Soviet students in the postwar Stalin years and the Thaw, and which comments briefly on elections.

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porters are made more credible. This chapter relies on a range of archival

sources,8 as well as Soviet publications, recent memoirs, and interviews.9

In looking at youth participation in elections to the Supreme Soviet and

to local soviets, the organs of the Soviet government, in the 1950s and

1960s, my essay shows that such events served the purpose of political

indoctrination by calling on activist Komsomol members to assist in con-

ducting elections. Still, the evidence shows the need to shift the traditional

historiographic emphasis from elections as purely political events, by

drawing attention to elements of merry-making inherent to the election

process. Comparing these to other Soviet celebrations, I argue that the

system, in contrast to the image of top-down coercive indoctrination, also

offered significant consumption-oriented incentives for those willing to

participate. This reveals the softer side of dictatorial dominance of elec-

tions as social practice.

While youth participation in elections to the Supreme Soviet and local

soviets remained largely unchanged from the Stalin years to the Thaw, my

research finds more of a break in elections within the Komsomol itself.

Departing decisively from postwar Stalinist precedents, some young peo-

ple, drawing on the novel tones in the Komsomol leadership’s discourse

encouraging grassroots participation, challenged existing election practices.

These youth positioned themselves as a “loyal opposition” within Komso-

mol elections. They publicly expressed full support for the Khrushchev

leadership and the goal of building communism, while lambasting local

officials for authoritarian methods that made elections into a pure formal-

ity, and occasionally even taking power away from entrenched cadres. By

doing so, they demonstrated significant individual agency, meaning self-

willed actions responding to the interests and desires of young people

themselves (Krylova 2010; Appadurai 1996, 5–11; Grossberg 1992, 113–

27).

Such unanticipated, spontaneous elements in Komsomol elections un-

derscore that previously conformist “elections without choice” could be

transformed from a tool of political integration into a source of challenge

——————

8 From the Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI); Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyii arkhiv sotisial’no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI); Tsentral’nyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy (TsAGM); Tsentral’nyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii

Moskvy (TsAOPIM).

9 From an interview series that I conducted in 2008–09 with those who grew up in the post-Stalin years.

I N T E G R A T I O N , C E L E B R A T I O N , A N D C H A L L E N G E

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and instability for socialist states in times of reform and uncertainty, a

finding that parallels that of a number of other contributions to this vol-

ume.

Youth and Elections to Soviet Government Organs:

Integration and Celebration

A resolution by the KCC at its Fifth Plenum in December 1950 dealing

with elections to the Supreme Soviets of the republics making up the So-

viet Union, their highest government bodies, stressed the critical organiza-

tional role ascribed to activist Komsomol youth. The decree noted that

such young people already performed agitation work for the elections to

local soviets: “Hundreds of thousands of Komsomol members worked as

agitators, took part in setting up and decorating election sites and agitation

points, putting together lists of voters”. It called on them to perform

analogous tasks for these elections, such as organizing election sites, in-

forming voters of the time and place of voting, and organizing various

mass events, including lectures, meetings with candidates, and cultural

events at election sites. The resolution even directly cited the political so-

cialization and integration function of elections: “The upcoming elections

[...] will enhance the further growth of the political activity of Soviet

youth”.10 Similar rhetoric characterized the Khrushchev years.11

While previous research made patent youth involvement in agitation

and propaganda devoted to elections to the soviets, it paid little attention

to the cultural events also referred to in the decrees, which cast light on

elements of celebration and festiveness that were present both before and

after Stalin’s death. One of the principal forms of such youth engagement

in Soviet democracy came via amateur arts collectives, volunteer groups of

young amateur musicians and actors, which had substantial popularity

among the citizenry. The government sponsored the amateur arts collec-

tives, providing the institutional and organizational basis for these groups

in state-owned clubs, sending government-paid cultural workers to lead the

——————

10
Posotanovlenie piatogo plenuma TsK VLKSM (26–27 dekabria 1950 goda)
(Moscow:

“Molodaia gvardiia”, 1951), 7–14.

11 A. N. Shelepin,
Otchetnyi doklad TsK VLKSM XII s’’ezdu komsomola
(Moscow: “Molodaia gvardiia”, 1954), 42.

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groups, and creating spaces and supplying musical and theatre equipment

for their performances. Altogether, Moscow apparently had over 1,400

collectives in 1947, which put on over 7,000 or more shows.12

The Soviet state frequently engaged the amateur arts collectives to per-

form at election sites. One of the principal tasks of the Moscow Krasno-

presnenskii district Cultural-enlightenment department involved overseeing

the work of labor union clubs and their amateur arts collectives. Its annual

report of 1951 records how the department organized “Performances of

amateur arts at district enterprises during the days of the election cam-

paign”, specifically praising the club of the Moscow Sugar factory for hav-

ing “good amateur arts, which performed at election sites”.13 In 1957, this

same organization reported that it had 1,500 young people in over 70 col-

lectives giving over 130 concerts, with some dedicated to elections to local

soviets.14 By 1959, about 3,000 young people participated in amateur arts

collectives, giving over 300 concerts for approximately 200,000 people in

the Krasnopresnenskii district. According to the report, such amateur arts

are “used in all district political-mass events, and during the time of the

elections to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and local soviets in 1959

alone there were over 100 concerts”.15 The KCC underlined the critical

role of clubs to Soviet-style democracy in a report in the autumn of 1945

about the problematic state of cultural work in labor union clubs, with “the

acute nature of this problem made worse by the fact that clubs are cur-

rently obliged to do much work in relation to the election campaign”.16 A

1946 KCC decree, entitled “About mass physical culture events dedicated

to elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet”, demonstrates that other organ-

ized leisure events also served to promote Soviet democracy.17

Youth also constituted the object of celebratory elements in elections

to the Soviet government in addition to being the subjects supplying such

festivities. In one case in point, the Moscow food industry club held an

evening for the young voters of the food industry workforce on November

25, 1950 with a talk entitled “The Stalin constitution and Soviet youth”,

followed by a play based on a novel by the laureate of the Stalin prize, E.

——————

12 TsAGM, f. 2011, op. 1, d. 49, ll. 357–59.

13 TsAGM, f. 1988, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 8–10.

14 TsAGM, f. 1988, op. 1, d. 52a, ll. 8–9.

15 TsAGM, f. 1988, op. 1, d. 72, l. 24.

16 RGASPI, f. M–1, op. 3, d. 403, ll. 17–22.

17 RGASPI, f. M–1, op. 3, d. 408, l. 10.

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87

Kazakevich.18 The Komsomol election committee conference of Krasno-

presnenskii district in 1950 records that “there were especially many inter-

esting events for youth during the preparation for the 70th anniversary of

Stalin’s birth and the election campaign”.19 No wonder, then, that Irina,

who grew up under Khrushchev, recalls elections as a time of leisure and

celebration, with concerts of amateur arts, enjoyable social interaction, and

cheap goods for sale.20 Still, for some youth involved in amateur arts and

agitation related to elections, this occasionally proved a burden. Thus, in

1951, a Komsomol official at the Government University of Theater Arts

(GITIS) complained of the excessive requirements placed upon the stu-

dents both to perform and propagandize for elections, which apparently

hindered their actual education.21

The amateur arts collectives also performed at other ideologically and