Electoral Studies ( 1990), 9: 1, 59-66

The Elections to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies March 1989

STEPHEN WHITE

The University, Glasgow G12 8RT, Scotland

Soviet elections have traditionally been seen as ‘acclamatory’ exercises in which voters simply ratify a choice of candidates that has been made beforehand by the party authorities.’ Under Soviet election law, most recently the statute of 1978, there was in fact no limit to the number of candidates that might be nominated and placed on the ballot paper. Stalin, when the USSR Supreme Soviet was first established in the late 193Os, even assured a western journalist that there would be a ‘very lively electoral struggle’ for the seats that were available (Stalin, 1967, p. 130). Needless to say, no choice of candidate, still less of party or programme, was permitted throughout the period of his general secretaryship or that of his immediate successors, and it was not until the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 that electoral reform began to receive the attention of the leadership as part of a ‘democratization’ of the political system as a whole.

Until Gorbachev’s accession, Soviet voters were limited not just in the number of candidates from whom they could choose. In such ‘elections without choice’, at least until 1987, the composition of each group of deputies was carefully determined by the party authorities, leaving local officials the task of matching individual candidates to the gender, occupation and other parameters that were given to them. The right of nomination was reserved, under the Constitution, for the CPSU and other party-controlled organizations, and the few attempts that were made to challenge this monopoly (for instance Medvedev, 1979) were easily rebuffed. Voters could theoretically reject the single candidate, and at the local level they occasionally did. At the national level, however, no candidate was ever defeated, nor indeed returned by less than an overwhelming majority. At the last national elections, in 1984, the turnout had reached a giddy 99.99 per cent and the vote in favour of the single list of candidates- 99.94 and 99.95 per cent for the two chambers of the Supreme Soviet-was the highest ever recorded (White, 1985).

At the outset of his general secretaryship Gorbachev devoted relatively little attention to political reform, believing that the attainment of a more rapid rate of economic growth was (as he put it to the 27th Party Congress in 1986) ‘the key to all our problems’ (Materiuly 1987, p. 22). A brief reference in the same speech, however, indicated that the General Secretary was aware of the need to make ‘correctives’ in the electoral system, and this in turn became a central theme of his addresses to the January 1987 Central Committee plenum and to the 19th Party Conference in June 1988, the first such gathering for nearly fifty years. A limited

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60 The Elections to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies March 1989

experiment duly took place at the local elections of June 1987 in which a choice of candidates was provided in about 1 per cent of the constituencies, each of which

returned several members (White, 1988; Hahn, 1988). Gorbachev, in his speech to the Party Conference, suggested that competitiveness had made the elections ‘more

lively, the voters more interested and the deputies more conscious of their responsibilities’, and the resolution on political reform with which the Conference concluded committed the party to a ‘substantial renewal of the electoral system’ in line with Gorbachev’s report. The draft of a new electoral law embodying these very different principles was published on 23 October and formally adopted on 1 December 1988 after a brief but interesting public discussion (White, 1990).

The 1988 Electoral Law

The new electoral law made it clear that a choice of candidates was to become a normal rather than exceptional occurrence (for the text see Z&on, 1988). Under

Article 38 an unlimited number of candidates may be nominated for each of the seats available; the draft had specified that ‘as a rule’ there should be a choice of candidate in each case, but the final test avoided this rather ambiguous formulation and made no definite requirement either way. The right to nominate, under the law, was extended to voters’ meetings of 500 or more in addition to the Communist Party and other public organizations (Art. 37). Deputies cannot hold governmental positions at the same time as they exercise their representative duties (Art. 1 l), in line with what Soviet lawyers have called the ‘principle of incompatibility’, and they must normally live or work in the area they represent (Art. 37). Candidates, under the new law, must present their ‘programmes’ to the electorate (Art. 45), and they have the right to appoint up to ten campaign staff (‘entrusted persons’) to assist them (Art. 46). Voters, for their part, must pass through a booth or room before casting their vote, even if (exceptionally) only a single candidate is standing (Art. 52). The new legislation was to apply to all future elections beginning with the national elections in March 1989; these, the Central Committee promised at its meeting on 28 November 1988, would be ‘unlike all those that had preceded them’.

The new electoral law in turn formed part of an extensive reconstruction of the Soviet state. Under the terms of the constitutional amendments, which were also approved on 1 December, an entirely new representative structure was established

headed by a USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, reminiscent in some ways of the Congresses of Soviets that had exercised governmental authority during the 1920s and 1930s. The Congress, which would meet annually, was to be elected in three ways: 750 deputies were to represent constituencies of equal voter numbers; another 750, as before, were to represent the different national-territorial areas of the USSR; and much more controversially, a further 750 were to represent social organizations such as the Communist Party and the trade unions (Constitution, Art. 109). The Congress, it was agreed, would in turn elect a 542-member Supreme Soviet, which would meet ‘as a rule’ for six to eight months of the year, with a fifth of its members retiring annually (Arts. 111 and 112). Local Soviets were to be elected for a five-year term (Art. 90) twice as long as before, and no deputy was allowed to serve on more than two Soviets at the same time (Art. 96). The whole structure was capped by a Chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet, a kind of executive presidency (Art. 12 1); this ofice, and its equivalents at lower levels, would normally be combined with the party leadership.

STEPHEN WHITE 6x

The Campaign: Nominating Candidates

Under the new election law the campaign was to proceed through two main stages. In the first, nominations were made and then approved or otherwise by a selection conference in the constituency or social organization in question. In the second stage, the candidates that had been ‘registered’ in this way were to compete among themselves for the support of their electorate: in the ordinary constituencies up to election day, which was fured for 26 March 1989, or in the social organizations up to a date that was to be Exed at some point during the previous fortnight. This was a new, elaborate and largely unfamiliar set of procedures; it was also one to which many citizens had strong objections. The representation that had been given to social organizations, in particular, appeared to violate the principle of ‘one person, one vote’, and the holding of selection conferences to approve a final list of candidates was also unpopular. Who needed such ‘elections before elections’, asked several correspondents during the discussion of the new legislation the previous autumn? It was pointed out, however, that some exercise of this kind was necessary so as to reduce a large number of nominations to more manageable proportions; and in any case this stage in the proceedings was bypassed in Estonia, most of Lithuania and some districts of Moscow precisely in order to leave such choices to the voters.

‘Ihe selection of candidates in the social organizations took a variety of forms. At one extreme was the CounciI of Collective Farms, which approved 58 candidates for its 58 seats by an open vote in hi-~-hour. The Communist Party itself caused some controversy by nominating no more than 100 names for the 100 seats it had been allocated under the Constitution. As well as ‘authoritative representatives of the working class and peasantry’ the list included most of the Politburo and Secretariat, together with a wide range of figures from science, education, culture and the arts (the Bolshoi soloist Yevgeny Nestorenko was perhaps the most unlikely inclusion), (Ma&~%~ly, 1989). A somewhat more open process took place in the trade unions, which took seven hours and several rounds of voting to choose their 114 candidates for the 100 seats that were available. There was still greater controversy in the Academy of Sciences, where 23 candidates were chosen on 18 January 1989 to contest the 20 seats available. The list did not include Andrei Sakharov, Roald Sagdeev and several other reform-minded and well-supported academics, and a continuing campaign of public and private lobbying took place in an attempt to secure their inclusion at a later stage.

The seiection of candidates in the constituencies took a still wider variety of forms. A selection conference at Melitopol in the Ukraine, for instance, was packed out by officials to such an extent that it reminded one participant of a conference of party activists. Of the 33 who asked to speak only five were chosen, all of whom supported the local party first secretary; indeed only one of them even raised the possibility that there might be another candidate. The party secretary was duly approved by an overwhelming majority. There were many cases of pressure by party secretaries on other candidates to withdraw; so successful were these efforts in Kazakhstan that all 17 of the repubIic’s regional party secretaries were unopposed- a ‘strange monopoly’ as Pravda remarked on 21 March. But there were also much more open exercises, for instance in Moscow’s No. 1 territorial constituency, where eleven hours of discussion produced two academics as candidates after the poet Yevtushenko, the economist Gavriil Popov and the cosmonaut Igor Volk had all been rejected. Overall, according to a survey conducted under the auspices of the

62 The Elections to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies March 1989

Academy of Sciences, about half of those polled described the selection conferences as ‘democratic’ and about half described them as ‘controlled by their organizers’ (Levansky et al., 1989, p. 15); this was probably close to the reality.

In the end, according to the Central Electoral Commission, 880 candidates were approved by the various public organizations to fight the 750 seats they had been allocated. Only 198 (22.5% ) were women, nearly half of whom represented women’s councils; 15.9 per cent were workers and 10.3 per cent were collective farmers, all significantly below the proportions for which they had accounted within the outgoing Supreme Soviet. A much more substantial group of candidates (35.7% ) were employed in science, the health services and the arts, and no fewer than 778 (88.4% ) were members or candidate members of the CPSU. Some 2,895 candidates were selected to fight the 1,500 constituency seats: in 384 constituencies, despite the intentions of the law, there was just a single candidate, but in the remainder there were two or more contenders, and in one of the Moscow seats no fewer than 12 candidates were approved. Again, just 16.6 per cent of the registered candidates were women, 25.2 per cent were workers, 12 per cent were collective farmers, and a massive 85.3 per cent were members or candidate members of the CPSU (Pravda, 1 February and 11 March 1989).

The Vote: Electing Deputies

Voting in the social organizations began on 11 March, and concluded shortly before the national vote in the ordinary constituencies. Not all the seats, in the event, were filled: the Soviet Peace Fund, for instance, fdled just 5 of its 7 seats, and the Academy of Sciences only 8 of its 20. This required a further round of balloting within the following two months in order to make up a full complement. More controversial

candidates were often unsuccessful: the playwright Mikhail Shatrov, for instance, who was a candidate for the Union of Theatrical Workers, or the political commentator Alexander Bovin, who was seeking one of the Journalist Union’s ten places. Many organizations simply nominated as many candidates as they had seats available; the Union of Friendship Societies, to take another example, put up five candidates for its five seats, all of whom were elected. The vote in favour of such candidates, however, was not necessarily unanimous, and even Gorbachev, standing for one of the Communist Party’s 100 seats, had 12 votes cast against him (52 of the candidates were elected unanimously). The largest negative vote (78) was cast against the prominent conservative Yegor Ligachev, allowing Boris Yeltin a fairly well-rehearsed campaign joke: What would have happened if the CPSU had nominated not 100 but 101 candidates for the 100 seats it had been allocated?

Voting in the ordinary constituencies began in the Far East on the evening of 25 March (since it was already the following morning by local time) and lasted from 7a.m. until 8p.m. everywhere except Armenia, where it was arbitrarily extended by two hours. The first and in some ways most significant result was the turnout. Early forecasts indicated a level of 80-85 per cent; the final figure, according to the Central Electoral Commission, was 89.8 per cent-well down on the figure that had been reported in 1984 but a much more credible return. Turnout was highest in the Central Asian republics, where traditional forms of mobilization appear to have persisted: Uzbekistan, for instance, reported a turnout of 95.8 per cent, and in Turkmenia it was 96.1 per cent. Lower figures were reported by the Baltic republics (from 82.5 in Lithuania to 87.1 per cent in Estonia) and the lowest figure of all was

STEPHEN WHITE 63

returned by Armenia, where an active boycotting campaign was organized. Just 7 1.9 per cent of Armenian voters, according to the official return, took part in the election, and barely half (53% ) of voters in the capital, Yerevan, did so. In the end, according to the Central Electoral Commission, three of the 1,500 constituencies failed to yield a result because fewer than half of the voters had taken part (Izvestiya, 5 April 1989, p. 1). There were also substantial numbers of spoiled ballots, particularly because voters, unfamiliar with the new procedures, had left more than one name on the paper: in some areas this accounted for up to 10 per cent of all the votes.

The results, constituency by constituency, were still more remarkable. In 76 of the 1,500 seats in which three or more candidates had been standing none of them secured more than half of the vote and a run-off had to be declared between the two best-placed contenders. Still more surprisingly, even ‘sensationally’ for Zzvestiya, in 195 constituencies in which only one or two candidates were standing none of them secured more than half of the votes and the whole exercise had to be repeated within the following two months. A whole series of political leaders were successfully returned in the constituencies that did declare a result, including the party leaders, prime ministers and presidents of Estonia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenia, and the prime minister and president of the Russian Republic, by far the largest of the 15 union republics. There were also some outstanding votes for individual party secretaries, such as the Astrakhan and Tambov frost secretaries who received 96 and 92 per cent respectively of the votes cast.

Much more striking, however, were the defeats that were suffered by party and state leaders at all levels, Altogether 38 district and regional party first secretaries were rejected, most of whom were members of the Central Committee. The losers included the Lithuanian prime minister and president, the Latvian prime minister, the party first secretary and mayor of Kiev, the mayor of Moscow, and the party first secretaries of Minsk, Kishinev, Samarkand, Alma-Ata and Frunze. The runaway success of former party secretary Boris Yeltsin in the Moscow national-territorial seat (he took 89.4 per cent of the poll) was a particular snub to the central authorities, given the emphasis he had placed upon the abolition of privileges and the attempts that had been made to frustrate his campaign. The most spectacular defeats of all, however, were in Leningrad, where a whole series of officials failed to obtain a place including the regional first secretary (a Politburo member) and second secretary, the chairman of the city Soviet and his Erst deputy, the chairman of the regional Soviet and the city party secretary (who obtained a humiliating 15 per cent of the vote in a contest with a young shipyard worker).* It was understandably some time before the full dimensions of this rebuff reached the columns of Soviet newspapers.

The 1989 Elections and Soviet Politics

1. There is little doubt that these were the fairest, most ‘genuine’ elections that have yet taken place in the USSR. There were, admittedly, some violations of the law. The very first voter at one of the polling stations in Alma-Ata was allowed to cast a ballot for his whole family (Pravda, 27 March 1989, p. 2). In the Leningrad constituency in which Solov’ev, the regional party first secretary, was standing unopposed, the voting booths were placed at the side of the polling station in clear violation of the law and of central directives. ‘Why not just put up a notice-straight ahead to the

64 The Elections to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies March 1989

ballot box!’ commented one indignant voter, who preferred to remain anonymous (Izzvestz’ya, 27 March 1989, p. 2). And yet in other areas there was a close, almost obsessive concern with the letter of the law. There were several calls to the Central Electoral Commission, for instance, to ask if pencils could be used in the voting booths instead of pens. And there were other questions: for instance, could a drunk be allowed to vote? And why were election posters still on display on the day of the election, when all agitation was supposedly prohibited? Personal experience in Leningrad, for what it is worth, suggests that close attention was paid to the law: polling stations, though sometimes in unsuitable premises, were properly furnished, and every effort was made to ensure that voters passed through a booth before casting their vote. Offtcials were on hand to answer questions, policemen preserved public order, and representations of the candidates kept a close eye on the whole proceedings.

2. The main objective of the exercise, from the point of view of the authorities, was less to select a group of deputies than to persuade the Soviet public to take a voluntary part in the political process. Some impression of their response is apparent in the results of a survey which was carried out by the AR-Union Institute for the Study of Public Opinion in urban areas throughout the USSR (Izvestiya, 22 April 1989, p. 6). Over 80 per cent of respondents were familiar, at least in part, with the new procedure for the election of deputies. Some 48 per cent of respondents welcomed the new election arrangements, 13 per cent were against, and the remaining 40 per cent refrained from judgement. Asked to choose which method of intluencing state decisions were likely to be most effective, 14 per cent suggested election campaigns and voting; this came well behind appearances on the television or in the papers (49% ) and taking part in public opinion polls (38% ) but just ahead of participation in meetings and demonstrations ( 13% ) and well ahead of participation in newly-established informal organizations (7% ).

The level of turnout, in the absence of the usual pressures from agitators to take part and of falsification on the scale of previous years, was certainly consistent with the view that these were elections that engaged a widespread degree of public interest and support (even in the run-off and repeat elections turnout was still 74.8 and 78.4 per cent respectively). Newspapers reported that complete strangers struck up conversations about their voting intentions, and on polling day itself there were queues in some places to enter the polling station and then to enter the voting booth, where candidate choice was finally made. In one Moscow constituency extra voting booths had to be constructed as a matter of urgency, so great was the pressure to make use of them, and reports from other constituencies spoke of the sick and handicapped coming to the polling stations in person rather than waiting to be visited by offtcials. The new elections also received unprecedented coverage in the media, particularly on television where two regular programmes, ‘Power to the Soviets’ and ‘Towards the Elections’, gave candidates and voters an opportunity to air their views. In a few areas, such as Estonia and Moscow, there were actual ‘telestruggles’ between the candidates themselves. Survey data indicated that television was the most important source of electoral information for 70.1 per cent of respondents, followed by the local and central press (54.3 and 53.4% respectively), (Levansky et al., 1989, p. 16).

3. If elections are about ‘sending messages to government’ (Harrop and Miller, 1987), then several themes could be said to have been forwarded by voters to the authorities. To judge at least from the candidates’ programmes, foreign affairs were

STEPHEN WHY 65

of little interest, apart perhaps from a reduction in military spending. For the great mass of candidates, however, four other areas were of pressing concern. The first of these was the food supply; the second was the housing situation; the third was the environment; and the fourth was the political system itself, including freedom of information legislation, further reform of the electoral system, greater religious toleration and freedom of movement within and across Soviet borders. A survey in Leningrad of communications from voters to candidates found that these four were the top priorities (Smena, 27 March 1989, p. 1). A poll by MOSCOW News found that the most important issues for its readers were the food supply and agriculture (41% ), human rights and democratization (39% ), inflation and prices (22% ), shortages (20% ), and housing and environmental pollution (both 19% ), ( 1989, no. 8, p. 10). In some of the republics, particularly in the Baltic, these concerns were intertwined with issues of a more directly nationalist character.

4. Finally, what will be the direct impact of these new-style elections upon the political system? In the short term a number of the defeated candidates were expected to resign their party and state posts; the Leningrad party leader and the Kiev party secretary were the first to do so, although there was no formal requirement to this effect. The election system came under close scrutiny, with considerable pressure for the abolition or at least reform of the representation of social organizations, and for the establishment of secret, equal and competitive voting directly to the Supreme Soviet, which under present arrangements is chosen from among its members by the Congress of People’s Deputies. Further electoral reform is to be considered by the new Congress in conjunction with further reform of the Constitution itself and the adoption of new legislation on local and republican government, trade unions, and the legal system. A small but active group of reform- minded deputies formed an Inter-Regional Deputies’ Group at the end of July 1989 to press for swift action on these and other matters.

The wider implications of these new-style Soviet elections, however, may also cast some doubt upon the way in which such exercises have traditionally been conceptualized. Among the functions of noncompetitive elections of this kind, it has been suggested, are political integration, legitimization, control through co- optation and co-responsibility (Harrop and Miller, 1987; similarly Milnor, 1965). The outcome of the 1989 Soviet elections appear in fact to have had some outcomes by no means so advantageous to the central authorities. The heavy defeats suffered by local party and state leaders, in particular, has placed the party’s claim to rule in some doubt. The deputies that were returned to the Congress of People’s Deputies drew their legitimacy from a popular mandate; the central authorities, in confronting them, had to rely upon their guaranteed quota of seats and unconvincing references to Leninism. The newly-elected deputies, moreover, were committed by their programmes to a series of improvements in popular living standards that the central authorities, with the best will in the world, would hardly be able to accommodate. The overwhelming success of nationalist candidates in the Baltic republics raised at least an implicit challenge to the existence of the state itself; when elections took place at lower levels of government in early 1990 it was likely that such candidates would dominate republican assemblies, at least in the Baltic. Soviet elections, in the past, may indeed have contributed marginally to national integration and political legitimacy. Under the very different circumstances that prevailed in the late 1980s they appeared at least as likely to contribute to instability and territorial fragmentation.

66 The Elections to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies March 1989

Notes

1. Apart from the press and other printed sources, this study makes use of Soviet radio and television broadcasts and also draws upon a field trip to Leningrad during the election period in the course of which election offtcials were interviewed and several polling stations were visited. 1 am grateful to the John Robertson Bequest of the University of Glasgow for facilitating this visit, and to the ESRC for its support of a larger body of work on contemporary Soviet policymaking. Unless otherwise indicated all statements in this paper are based upon the Soviet central and local press for the period concerned; specific citations are available upon request.

2. These results are drawn from the central press, 27 to 29 March 1989; a final list of all deputies elected appeared in Izvestiya, 5 April 1989, pp. 2-l 2.

References

Jeffrey Hahn, ‘An Experiment in Competition: the 1987 Elections to the Local Soviets’, Slavic Review, 47: 2, Fall 1988, pp. 434-48.

Martin Harrop and William L. Miller, Elections and Voters, (London: Macmillan, 1987). V.A. Levansky el al., ‘Izbiratel’naya kampaniya po vyboram narodnykh deputatov SSSR 1989

g. (Opyt sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniya)‘, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 7, 1989, pp. 12-25.

Materialy, Materialy XXVII s”e.zda KPSS, (Moscow: Politizdat, 1987). Materialy, Materialy plenuma Tsentral’nogo komiteta K?‘SS IO ianvarya 1989 goda,

(Moscow: Politizdat, 1989). Roy Medvedev, How I Ran for Election and How I Lost, (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1979). Alan J. Milnor, Elections and Political Stability, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965). I.V. Stalin, Socbineniya, 1 :14, 1967, (Stanford: Hoover Institution). Stephen White, ‘Noncompetitive Elections and National Politics: the USSR Supreme Soviet

Elections of 1984’, Electoral Studies, 43, December 1985, 215-29. Stephen White, ‘Reforming the Electoral System’, Journal of Communist Stua’ies, 4:4,

December 1988, pp. 1- 17. Stephen White, “‘Democratisation” in the USSR’, Soviet Studies, 42:1, January 1990, pp. l-24. Zakon, Zakon SSSR o vyborakb narodnykb deputatov SSSR, (Moscow: Izvestiya, 1988).