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Part I. Correlation Between Changes in the Electoral Legislation and the Transformation of the Political Regime

Published onFeb 22, 2024
Part I. Correlation Between Changes in the Electoral Legislation and the Transformation of the Political Regime

Democracy provides freedom of choice, but does not guarantee the indispensable choice of consistently democratic leaders. Democracy remains democracy if there is a real possibility of a change of leaders. If such an opportunity is blocked, it is time to raise the question of the transformation of the political regime. The emergence of authoritarianism appears to be the result of deliberate actions that can be likened to the poisoning of a political organism. Countries that have long-established democratic “rules of the game” sometimes manage, if not to develop immunity to this kind of “poisoning,” then at least to minimize their negative effects. Even if very odious and authoritarian politicians (like Trump) come to power in consolidated democracies, as a rule, they fail to turn democratic regimes into authoritarian ones. But countries that are forced to create their political institutions from scratch (as happened after the collapse of communism) find it much more difficult to develop an effective “antidote” on their own.

As Vladimir Gelman argues, successfully building authoritarian regimes and ensuring their survival is a much more difficult task than successfully building democracies. Potential autocrats seeking to seize and maintain their own monopoly on power for a long time are forced to simultaneously solve several interrelated tasks. First, they must, if not completely get rid of challenges from political competitors and fellow citizens, at least minimize these risks. Secondly, they must prevent threats from those segments of the elite that seek to seize dominance in various ways (from military or “palace” coups, to joining the opposition).

“In the 30 years since the collapse of the USSR, Russia has gone from one consolidated authoritarian regime to another — from a communist one-party regime that dominated the country for 70 years to a personalist electoral authoritarianism that reached its consolidation stage during the presidency of Vladimir Putin.”1 Now, looking back, it seems extremely important to analyze and comprehend this entire path. At least for the sake of those who come after us to have in their hands a certain tool for measurement that would help prevent future mistakes, because, as is known, history cruelly avenges the unlearned and unmastered lessons of the past.

We will try to trace the “poisoning” of the Russian political body through the prism of the transformation of electoral legislation. We assume that if our analysis coincides with the political science division into periods of the changes of the political regime which is given by experts in the field of political science, then it is time to raise the question of electoral legislation as a marker of the true goals and objectives of power. For these purposes, we will use the division into periods drawn from the appraisals of Vladimir Gelman, Grigory Golosov, Mikhail Komin and Andrey Medushevsky, Dmitry Oreshkin, and Alexander Kynev.

Elections in Russia before 1993—A Brief Description

It is impossible to truly understand the peculiarities of the development of the electoral legislation of Russia in the first post-Soviet thirty years without taking into account the level of electoral culture, the long tradition of a one-party system and other habits, stereotypes and other layers of the past that have been inherited from the socialist system in modern times. Therefore, it seems necessary to give at least a brief overview of this past.

Almost until the last decade of the twentieth century in Russia, due to the lack of practice, ideas about free elections had not been formed. And we probably cannot yet speak about their fairness. A full comprehension of this reality is possible only now. Because the spirit of freedom and the illusion of a breakthrough in the ‘90s often overshadow sober assessments of the true state of affairs. So, what did we have before the first partially free and so far the only stunning or overturning elections in the history of Russia, which took place on March 26, 1989?

Elections to the State Duma of the Russian Empire were multistage. They were held in four unequal curiae: 1) landowning, 2) urban, 3) the peasantry and 4) workers. The norm of representation of the landowning curia was one elector for two thousand people; in the city, one elector for four thousand; in the peasantry, one elector for thirty thousand; and in the working class, one elector for ninety thousand.

The democratic law on elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917 was revolutionary for Russia: it was far ahead of the social development of electoral legislation in other countries. In accordance with it, universal, equal, direct elections were established with secret ballot. Voting rights were granted to women and military personnel. The lowest voting age limit in the world for that time was set at 20 years. The regulation on elections to the Constituent Assembly did not recognize property qualifications, residence and literacy qualifications, restrictions on class, religion or nationality. Elections were free and provided alternatives. However, the implementation of all these democratic institutions was far from what was intended. The elections dragged on for several months. Less than 50% of voters took part in them, and the representative body formed as a result lasted only a day and was forcibly dissolved. So this electoral experience turned out to be unsuccessful and fruitless.

In the period from 1918 to 1936, elections in the RSFSR and in the USSR, as in the pre-revolutionary period, were not consistently democratic, since the function of dictatorship (forced removal of part of the population from participation in government) was directly provided for in the Constitution. Therefore, the elections were not universal. The right to vote was given to all citizens who were 18 years old by the day of the elections and earning their livelihood through productive and socially useful labor. These were workers and employees of all types and categories, employed in industry, trade, agriculture, etc., and peasants and Cossack farmers who did not use hired labor to make a profit. Those who lived on unearned income (exploiters) did not receive the right to vote—those who had interest from capital, income from enterprises, income from property, etc. Nor were private merchants, monks and clergymen of churches and religious cults, employees and agents of the former police, and members of the ruling house in Russia allowed to vote. In 1925 in Leningrad, Kyiv and Moscow, about 10% of the entire mass of voters were deprived of voting rights. Of these: persons using hired labor were 5.3%; persons with “unearned” income—8.3%; merchants—39.9%; ministers of a religious cult—4.9%; from the ranks of the former police—3.2%; the mentally ill—1.2%; those disenfranchised by court verdicts—8.8%; and family members of the “disenfranchised”—28.4%. During the period of the election campaign for the elections of village councils in 1927 in the country as a whole, persons deprived of the right to vote amounted to 2,110,650 people, or 3.5% of all voters.

The elections were not equal. The Soviet government did not have much confidence in the peasantry and actually reproduced the pre-revolutionary proportions of representation in cities and in the countryside. In the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, one deputy from the city council represented 25,000 voters, and one deputy from provincial councils represented 125,000 provincial residents. The ratio of 1 to 5 allowed the deputies from the workers not to “sink” among the deputies from the less class-conscious peasantry. In the first two Soviet decades, elections were not secret. Voting was by show of hands. Members of party, Komsomol and other organizations closely observed who voted and how.

The 1936 Constitution of the USSR. On December 5, 1936, a new Constitution of the USSR was adopted, which abolished the constitutional dictatorship and expanded the electoral rights of citizens. “All citizens of the USSR who have reached the age of 18, regardless of race and nationality, religion, educational qualification, settlement, social origin, property status and past activities, have the right to participate in the election of deputies and be elected, with the exception of insane persons and persons adjudged disenfranchised by a court.” Separate articles guaranteed the observance of the electoral rights of women and military personnel. It was a majoritarian single-mandate system of an absolute majority. However, passive suffrage (the right to stand for election) was limited—the right to nominate candidates was granted only to labor collectives and public organizations. And this was natural, since according to the Constitution (Article 3), all power in the USSR belonged to the working people of the city and countryside.

This situation concerning the restriction of passive suffrage remained until 1988, that is, until the adoption of a new version of the next Constitution of the USSR, that of 1977. This Constitution, which proclaimed the expansion of the social base of power (Article 2. “All power in the USSR belongs to the people”), nevertheless did not eliminate the contradiction between the declared sovereignty of the people and the restriction of passive suffrage, laid down in 1936—as before, only labor collectives and public organizations could nominate candidates for deputies.

The main problem of the elections throughout this period was the practice of the so-called “orders,” as a result of which the elections became completely uncontested. Candidates for nomination descended to labor collectives “from above,” from party bodies, ostensibly to ensure the norm of representation from all social groups. As a result, only one candidate from the “indestructible bloc of communists and non-party people” was on the ballot. There was not a word about such practice in the legislation. Literally before the war, the ballot papers contained the phrase “strike through the rest.” However, there was no one to delete. But this phrase soon disappeared from the ballots.

And it was only the new version of the Constitution, adopted on December 1, 1988, in pursuance of the resolutions of the XIX Conference of the CPSU “On Some Urgent Measures for the Practical Implementation of the Reform of the Political System of the Country”, “On the Democratization of Soviet Society and the Reform of the Political System” and “On the Legal Reform,” that moved long since overdue reform of the electoral system from a standstill. Today there is a lot of discussion about whether the elections of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR in 1989 were free and fair. After all, indeed, during those elections, despite the fact that forces loyal to the CPSU managed to get the majority of mandates, 38 first secretaries of regional committees lost to opposition candidates. Among others, Andrei Sakharov received a mandate, becoming a symbol of the opposition’s emotional and reputational victory.

Strictly as a matter of law, these elections were not completely free and fair. Their main difference from the previous forty years of elections was the presence of alternatives. And this was exactly what was met with such enthusiasm by the population. In addition, finally, the right to nominate candidates was granted not only to labor collectives, but to meetings of voters at the place of residence and military personnel in military units (Article 9 of the USSR Law “On Elections of People’s Deputies of the USSR”). And yet these elections were not quite equal. Along with single-seat elections for two thirds of the Congress, one third of it was elected directly from all-Union public organizations, again according to “order,” but now already provided for by law: 100 deputies from the CPSU; 100 deputies from trade unions; 100 deputies from organizations of cooperatives; 75 deputies from the Komsomol; 75 deputies from women’s councils united by the Committee of Soviet Women; 75 deputies from organizations of military and labor veterans; 75 deputies from scientific societies; 75 deputies from creative unions; and 75 deputies from other public organizations that had all-union bodies.2

Nevertheless, these elections clearly showed how the electoral legislation plays the role of a magic key in the process of democratization. Because it was from these elections and from the representative body formed as a result of them that great transformative shifts began in the country. It was democratization from above. Half-hearted and contradictory, when the elites acted partly at random, including due to the lack of serious democratic knowledge in the conditions of the just emerging and still very weak political science. Support for this democratization from below was also based on substitute theses. The total unavailability of goods, the lack of food, the dictatorship of the party and the secret services with which people were totally fed up, censorship in the media—these were the true reasons for this support. If the people knew about democracy, freedom, human rights, separation of powers and the rule of law, it was from hearsay. But slogans for democracy and freedom were heard at rallies. And then another story began, which could not but be a natural continuation of Soviet perestroika and democratization. Imperfect Soviet under-developed democracy continued not as Soviet democracy, but as imperfect defective democracy.

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