Just How 'Soviet' Was the December 2 Election?

By Tracy Dove, Ph.D
Editor, The Russia News Service

December 5, 2007

The Russian elections of December 2 had the rare and unusual effect of uniting the international press into a single voice of accusation this week, insisting that Vladimir Putin stole his overwhelming victory of 64% and that Russian officials were the architects behind the fraud. Western governments, election watchdogs and a few angry Russians are calling the vote unfair, while the few monitors who oversaw the process were more careful to call it "uneven". Anatoly Chubais, the Godfather of the privatization program of the Russian economy in the 90's, came forward to criticize the travesty of democracy, going so far as to call it a "disgusting" repeat of Soviet voting practices. While it may be true that the government coerced and managed the outcome of the vote, reducing it to the level of "Soviet" is too simple, although the message that the Duma elections were rigged by the Russian government is certainly more sinister with the word "Soviet" attached to it.

In order to qualify the charges leveled by Chubais, it is necessary to recognize that the Soviet Union was first and foremost a one-party state, and this is not the case with present-day Russia. After 1917, there was a brief flirtation with plurality in the early Soviet election process, but this policy of tolerance was jettisoned once the Bolsheviks came in a distant second behind the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR's) in elections of 1918. It was a dangerous precedent, having free elections, so Lenin reduced the competition by having opposition party members arrested, coerced and murdered if they didn't join the Communist Party. The paranoia of losing an election was so great that Josef Stalin had his best friend, Sergey Kirov, murdered for his popularity- even though Communist domination was already certain by 1934. Democracy was certain, but it was "managed" by the Communist Party.

After World War II, leaders of the Soviet satellite countries spoke of democracy in their countries, which naturally baffled the western world, since nothing of the sort could be seen coming out of Moscow. Surprisingly, though, the structure of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was actually based on early Athenian democracy, in that between congresses an executive committee was elected to run the city, province or country in the name of the party. Also, the way in which those executives were elected resembled this ancient form of government even more so when one looks closer at the grassroots model of the party. In theory, the local Soviets- which where basically mini-governments of regions- put forward candidates who held election campaigns, and within 6 weeks time a vote would be held and a winner declared. These two facets of what we now call "Soviet Democracy" do indeed hark back to a more innocent period of Greek history, but a few things got lost in the 2,500+ year transition.

Firstly, the Athenians knew of no "vanguard of the proletariat"- which was Lenin's tactic of dominating the political process. The Russians, Lenin believed, were too ignorant to vote in their working class interests, so for their protection a monopoly on political agitation was handed over to the Bolsheviks, who didn't necessarily have the pedigree to be running the country either. The result was a political atmosphere of election hype and excitement, but little choice when the Soviet citizen went to the polling station.

And go he did: while voting was not mandatory in the Soviet Union, there were sever repercussions for those who didn't go. Vacations were rationed to regular voters, whose internal passports were stamped with every vote cast, and access to consumer goods and better jobs was granted only to the most political of citizens. This week's vote was neither mandatory nor monopolized; there was a choice for the electorate- albeit a shallow and uninspiring one- and the turnout was far less that the Soviet Union's boasts of over 98% participation.

It is noteworthy that Anatoly Chubais came out to discredit the vote as "Soviet". Chubais is the architect of the coupon privatization that enabled a well-entrenched nomenklatura to steal the much of the economy in the 1990's- much like the Communists did for 70 years before that. Vladimir Putin's success in this week's elections is certainly Russian democracy's failure, but the president of Russia is not to be blamed for the sham vote. Russians are overwhelmingly supportive of the only man in Russian history who has brought both stability and prosperity at the same time without using a birch rod to do so, and there wasn't a candidate out there who was half as attractive as Putin. The president is obviously using the Chinese model of keeping democracy muted in the name of economic prosperity, but to not open the playing field in the future to qualified candidates will ultimately betray the marginal successes of "managed democracy" in Russia.

Tracy Dove, editor of The Russia News Service, is a Professor of History and Dean of Summer Programs for the Lessing Institute. He also teaches history at the Anglo-American College in Prague.

See all previous articles by Tracy Dove here.