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Mass Obedience: Practices and Functions

of Elections in the German Democratic

Republic1

Hedwig Richter

The Soviet army occupied East Poland on September 17, 1939. The rural

areas were on the brink of falling into chaos. Only few roads were passable

and there was hardly any electricity available. Refugees and defeated sol-

diers were roaming the countryside. Nevertheless, for the occupiers, the

organization of elections took priority. In order to bring the Ukrainian and

Belarusian areas under the control of the Soviet power, the population

were supposed to elect a representative and give their consent for Ukraine

and Belarus to be unified within the Soviet Union as early as October. For

the first time, the communist superpower exported its system of voting,

dating from 1937, to another European country: elections, which in an

official sense were universal, fair, direct and secret (Constitution of the

Soviet Republic from 1936, article 135–140).

The methods for realizing and enforcing the elections would prove to

be paradigmatic for communist state elections. At the forefront lay a mas-

sive campaign, the core being made up of the electoral assemblies in the

factories or tenements. At these involuntary meetings, the agitators would

often hold speeches in Russian, a language that the Poles didn’t under-

stand. When the inhabitants of a village refused to take part in the meeting,

the vicinity was burned to the ground. However, the new authorities also

used incentives, promising to provide tractors, employment and good

food. What is remarkable is the ignorance of the voters. It is probable that

the majority of the electorate had no idea what they were voting for

(Alexander 2003, 313; Gross 1986).

The voting procedure also proved to be typical of state-socialist elec-

tions: the electorate had to vote as early in the day as possible. Those refus-

——————

1 Significant research for this article took place during my postdoctoral studies in Prague, enabled by the Institute of Contemporary History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Center for Contemporary History Potsdam in summer 2008. On this subject see also Richter 2009a, 283–295.

104

H E D W I G R I C H T E R

ing to do so later received reduced food rations, or were arrested or de-

ported. Election helpers would collect votes using “flying ballot boxes”.

The ballot papers, the ballot boxes and the voting booths demonstrated

the orientation towards the electoral standards of the West for fair, i.e.

secret ballots. At the same time, the authorities did everything they could

to circumvent the officially propagated secret ballot. The whole event was

staged by the Soviets as a celebration. Colorful bunting and banners with

political slogans were hung all over the vicinity. Musical ensembles played.

The election resulted in nearly 100 per cent turnout and assent (Gross

1986, 13–22).

What did the holders of power hope to achieve with such elections, es-

pecially as the Soviets had made no secret of their ambivalent and broken

relationship to democracy, and the fact that communist ideology did not

acknowledge the principle of majority rule (Beyme 1966, 1139–1153;

Diedrich 1966, 813)? Why go to so much trouble and expenditure, re-

peated in every other state-socialist country, albeit with lessening brutality?

Why didn’t the Soviet Union under Stalin create an appropriate electoral

system according to its needs? Why did the Soviet Union feel not only

obliged to conduct elections, but also to use the framework that had been

developed by the Western world to guarantee the electoral freedom of the

individual (Mergel 2005; Crook and Crook 2011)?

Political scientists and the few historians who have dealt with the topic

of elections under dictatorships interpret dictatorial modeled elections

mainly as a failed attempt to create the appearance of being democratic

(Leng 1969, 1170–1227; Hübner 1997, Jesse and Löw (eds.) 1998, Kloth

2000, Herz 2004; Nohlen 2009, 29–36). However, the hermeneutic catego-

ries that perceive elections as necessarily free and democratic and the pre-

dominant perspective from political science blind us to the cultural impor-

tance of elections in state-socialist dictatorships. Therefore, in order to

work out the analytical value of these elections, it would seem to make

more sense to take a cultural historical approach. In doing so, I will orient

myself methodologically towards a cultural history of politics. In this con-

text, it is of particular interest to follow the process of the “performative

shift” that Alexei Yurchak recognized for Soviet society (Yurchak 2006).

By focussing on the practices and the actors, the “culture of voting”

(Romain Bertrand) will be investigated. In order to do this, it is important

to have an understanding of state control, which apart from the aspect of

violence also takes into consideration the social aspect of exercising power

M A S S O B E D I E N C E

105

and perceives state dominance as a reciprocal process. With the aid of this

cultural historical approach and the concept of social dominance two hy-

potheses will be investigated: firstly, elections in communist states cannot

simply be interpreted as façades; instead they exhibit functions different to

Western democratic elections. Secondly, elections in state-socialism dem-

onstrate the attractiveness and unavoidability of the “modern” Western

democratic model in the 20th century.

Using these propositions as a starting point and using the GDR as an

example I will investigate state-socialist elections in three stages: first, I will employ an ethnological approach to describe the material setting and the

techniques of the elections. After that, I will undertake a small historical

excursion in which I will look at the communist understanding of elections

before 1945. Finally, I will seek to analyze state-socialist elections, by ques-

tioning their functions.

Practice and Technique of the Elections

Western Democratic Technique and Dictatorial Practice

By guaranteeing universal, equal, direct and secret elections in their

constitution, i.e. the four pillars of election fairness that had developed in

the Western world in order to guarantee equality, the state-socialists not

only upheld the requirements of democratic standards (constitution of the

GDR, 1949, Article 51; constitution of the GDR 1974, article 54), they also

sought to live up to Western norms. This is evident in the use of election

techniques and materiality: officially, there was supposed to be a standard-

ized voting ballot, voting booths and ballot boxes. These methods of hold-

ing a secret ballot, which had been developed in the Western world in the

19th Century, were implemented in Germany in 1903 with the support of

the Social Democrats (Crook and Crook 2011; Buchstein 2000).

In the case at hand, it is remarkable and in need of explanation how

strongly Western election norms came through, as it required an enormous

organizational and material effort for the ruling powers to outwit the Aus-

tralian ballot. The GDR government had also permitted a multiple party

system pro forma. The question why the communists officially didn’t dis-

tance themselves from the Western election techniques, which were so

closely tied to the idea of individual political rights, is of importance for an