Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (87 page)

drop by and help.

My address is: Apartment 2, 7 Voroshilov Street.

Apparently this family of a retired naval officer lives in lodgings in private

accommodation in one of those frame house areas without any infrastruc-

ture whatsoever and is terrorized by their landlady. The husband is pre-

pared at a pinch to make do with a ramshackle shack due for demolition.

The wife asks for an inspection of their living conditions. In this case, the

ballot paper was used to formulate a petition that had met with no success

through the official channels of the Soviet petition system because of the

length of the housing waiting list of the city council (Soviet). In any case,

the married couple’s request speaks of a paternalistic attitude. The sobering

description of their circumstances as such may be taken as evidence of the

failure of the concepts of the “socialist town” and the “new person”. On

the other hand, the remoteness from ideology of its argument hints at the

temporary relativization during the cultural “thaw” of schizophrenic atti-

tudes and forms of behavior in public as well as in private life. The ap-

proval of the candidate, in any case, though desired by the Party, is of no

importance for the married couple: the obvious threat of an electoral boy-

cott is not made. The Riger family is concerned solely to improve their

individual fate. It sees its participation in the elections as a formal act, al-

lowing it to perform the desired ritual of showing loyalty and at the same

time demonstrating its immunity.

Conclusion

Under the heading of “A Gigantic Demonstration of the Unity of the

Communist Party and the People”, the
Sovetskaia Belorussiia
reported on

328

T H O M A S M . B O H N

March 17 in detail on the elections to the Supreme Soviet.30 The official

final results, however, due to the immense size and the great number of

people in the Soviet Union, were not published until March 19. Right from

the outset no local discrepancies were expected and so only the results at

the Republic level were published. According to the official data, the Bela-

rusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR), with a turnout of nearly 100 per

cent and an approval rate of 99.8 per cent, returned a result above the

average for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR):31

Number of persons

Number of voters

entitled to vote

absolute

per cent

USSR 133,836,325

133,796,091

99.97

BSSR

5,277,630

5,276,902

99.99

Number of votes cast

for the Soviet of the Union

for the Soviet of Nationalities

absolute

per cent

absolute

per cent

133,214,652 99.57 133,431,524

99.73

5,268,396

99.84

5,267,110

99.81

Table 1: Announcement of the Central Electoral Committee for the Elections to the
Supreme Soviet of the Results of the Elections of March 16, 1958. Source: SB 67,
March 19, 1958, 1.

The figures as such offer evidence that the history of Soviet elections can-

not be written exclusively on the basis of their results. If one adopts the

approaches employed by the followers of a cultural history of politics, then

one should concentrate not just on Party programs and staged events, but

must regard election campaigns as forms of communication (Mergel 2005).

It makes little sense, therefore, to start laborious searches in archives for

hitherto unknown results for the city of Minsk. It would be more promis-

——————

30 Moshchnaia demonstratsiia edinstva kommunisticheskoi partii i naroda [A Gigantic Demonstration of the Unity of the Communist Party and the People]. In: SB 65,

17.3.1958, 1.

31 Soobshchenie Tsentral’noi izbiratel’noi komissii po vyboram v Verkhovnyi Sovet SSSR

ob itogakh vyborov 16 marta 1958 goda [Announcement of the Central Electoral Committee for the Elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Results of the Elections of March 16, 1958]. In: SB 67, 19.3.1958, 1. Vgl. auch MP 57, 19.3.1958, 1.

“ T H E P E O P L E ’ S V O I C E ” : E L E C T I O N S T O T H E S U P R E M E S O V I E T

329

ing to track down the minutes of election meetings so as to find out what

questions were asked by voters and what mandates the candidates were

given to fight for in parliament. The example of the ballot papers has

shown in any case that the range of ego documents from the Soviet Union

offers a broad enough variety. On the basis of the concepts “loyalty” and

“dissent” as well as “self-will” and “immunity”, new perspectives could be

opened up for the history of everyday life or the general public.

In the end, the elections to the Supreme Soviet of 1958 demonstrate

that the election campaign at the local level was not a media event but a

matter of work-place meetings. It was almost exclusively the Russian-

speaking part of the population that voiced its views on the ballot papers

while the Belarusian immigrants from the country markedly refrained from

comments, although they must have felt challenged by the latest develop-

ments in agricultural policy. In any case, the many protestations of belief in

Malenkov did at least correspond with the interests of the rural population.

Nevertheless, at the level of the Union, the elections constituted one more

step towards the consolidation of Khrushchev’s power. When the Supreme

Soviet convened on March 27, one of its first acts was to transfer to the

First Secretary of the Communist Party the chairmanship of the Council of

Ministers. All in all, the whole campaign took place in three different are-

nas dominated by correspondingly differing modi operandi: first, the offi-

cial pre-election meetings at the workplace served the Communist Party to

ascertain the public’s loyalty and in addition allowed for no dissent. Sec-

ond, the decision taken in one’s own four walls to participate in the elec-

tion was tantamount to submitting to a convention dictated by the Party-

state, although the electoral regulations permitted certain forms of non-

cooperation. For the mass of the population the “folding of the paper”—

i.e. the actual act of voting—was no more than a formal act that, in view of

the de-politicization on which it was based, was empty of any inner identi-

fication and bordered therefore on a demonstration of immunity. Third,

entering the polling booth was a sign of self-will not merely because of

breaking ranks with the societal consensus that had been reached through

the nomination of the candidates. This attitude is even reinforced both by

the fact that no provision was made for employing the ballot paper as a

means of communication and the fact that no regulations to deal with this

eventuality were ever introduced (Kloth 2000, 101–111).

Non-conformism and self-will can be tracked down therefore not only

in the proclamations of oppositional dissidents. They must be looked for

330

T H O M A S M . B O H N

also in the comments of ordinary people, which can be found, preserved

sometimes only in fragments, in the records of the surveillance state. With

reference to the petitions quoted above, which were written in 1958 by

voters looking for an apartment, it should be pointed out that the archives

hold not merely occasional comments written on ballot papers as well as

regular reports on the public mood by the security forces, but can also

offer great masses of the public’s petitions to the various agencies of Party

and state.

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