Election Campaign of 1937 for the Elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR: Legislation and Practical Implementation in the Rostov Region

Introduction. At the end of 1936 the new Constitution of the Soviet Union was adopted by the Extraordinary VIII All-Union Congress of Soviets, the supreme organ of the state power, which was specially convened for this purpose. Having replaced the first Constitution of the USSR of 1924, the new Stalin Constitution had significantly revised the structure of the Soviet state and society affecting, among other things, the system of state government bodies. Now the bicameral Supreme Soviet of the USSR was proclaimed the supreme legislative body of the country, which was to be formed through the universal, equal and direct elections with secret ballot (Article 30 of the Constitution of 1936). Even though from the dogmatic-legal point of view, the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were democratic, in reality they were completely controlled by the party authorities. This circumstance has been many times discussed in the scientific literature, however, up until now, the scientific papers studying the features of the electoral procedures in the USSR have often relied on the insufficiently broad document database, which was the reason for creating the politicized hypotheses lacking the scientific objectivity or emergence of outright falsification of the political history of the 1930s. Therefore, the relevance of further research on the USSR electoral processes increases, as well as of expansion of the empirical evidence base underlying the respective research to include the regional materials. The aim of the research is to analyse the previously unpublished archival documents; to identify the relationship between the norms of the Soviet electoral law of the 1930s and practices of political and administrative preparation for the USSR Supreme Soviet elections of 1937 in the Rostov Region; to determine the efficiency of the tools used by the Stalin’s regime to manage the electoral process; to establish the extent the elections to the Supreme Soviet were connected to the repressive campaign of 1937–1938.

Materials and Methods. The paper is based on the materials of the Rostov Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) stored in the Centre for Documentation of Contemporary History of the Rostov Region (CDNI RO). The materials included the reports of the District and Town Party Committees and NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) units describing in detail and without euphemisms (since the information was intended for a narrow circle of people) the preparation for the elections and the problems and difficulties faced by the local authorities. The periodicals of that time were studied. The research methodology included the general scientific and specific juridical methods, i.e. historical-legal and legalistic (dogmatic-legal).

Results. The article studies the economic conditions and political situation that had developed in the Rostov region by the end of the 1930s. It investigates the norms of the USSR Constitution of 1936 and the main legal acts, which enshrined the features of the electoral process of the 1937 elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The article substantiates the authors’ opinion about inconsistency of the attitudes existing in the literature to claim the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to be the cause of the Great Purge (Great Terror) of 1937: the Supreme Soviet only formally was the supreme power body of the country, in fact the Soviet Union was governed by the high-ranking party nomenclature headed by the General Secretary. The preparation for the elections to the Supreme Soviet was not the cause, but a component of the Great Purge (Great Terror), since the preparation was carried out by the authority representatives and employees of the state security apparatus using the preventive and repressive-punitive measures across a wide range of anti-Soviet-minded persons (clergy, believers, former Socialist Revolutionaries, Cossack re-emigrants, kulaks, etc.). Thus, the filtration measures carried out by the NKVD units in 1937 in the frame of preparation for the elections to the Supreme Soviet became an important element of the repressive campaign launched at that time and they achieved the goal set forward. On the election day, December 12, 1937, the voter turnout was high everywhere, and the voting results served the formal evidence of Soviet people full trust in their government and complete support of the political regime existing in the USSR.

Discussion and Conclusion. The elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, which took place on December 1937 and from a dogmatic-legal point of view were democratic (universal, equal, direct, with secret ballot), in reality were the result of a grandiose-scale campaign initiated by the Stalin’s regime and carried out under the rigid control of the party authorities. For successful implementation of this campaign, not only the administrative resources of the Soviet state and the agitation and propaganda apparatus were mobilized but also the enormous capacities of the state security apparatus: the agitation and propaganda apparatus prepared the public opinion for the election scenario desirable for the Communist Party, and the state security apparatus concentrated its efforts on removing “socially alien”, oppositionally-minded and undesirable to the Stalin’s regime persons from the society. That made it impossible for such persons to participate in the electoral procedures. Due to repressions the unwanted for the Communist Party excesses during the elections were excluded and large-scale protest voting prevented.

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