1924 Soviet Union legislative election

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Legislative elections were held in the Soviet Union in 1924 to elect members of the Congress of Soviets. Some of the citizenry were not enthusiastic about elections in rural areas held the same year, for a number of varied reasons, possibly including reduced faith in the Soviets, which would increase in later years. However, voter turnout amongst women was very high. [1] [2] [3] [4]

The elections were noteworthy for a number of reasons: Joseph Stalin rose to more prominence this year after Vladimir Lenin died, revealing his idea of "socialism in one country" and increasing criticism of Trotskyists within the Soviet Union as its relations with Western countries, like the United Kingdom varied. [5] [6] [7]

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Legislative elections were held in the Soviet Union in April 1927 to elect members of the Congress of Soviets, having originally been scheduled for 1 January. H. N. Brailsford, in his book, How the Soviets Work, he described how the elections work:

"A General Election was going on in Russia during my stay this year. Save for the reports in the news-papers, one would hardly have suspected it...There is no organization which could compile any alternative list of candidates, and if by mischance this were to happen in one electoral area, there could be no arrangement...No large issues of policy are ever settled at a Soviet election...The business of an election is rather to choose persons who will carry out the day to day work of administration. The entire structure of the Soviet system lends itself naturally to this limitation...The town and village Soviets, which are directly elected, are municipal authorities whose range of action and methods of work do not greatly differ from those of municipal bodies elsewhere...The atmosphere of a Soviet Election in Moscow is, accordingly, rather nearer to that of an English municipal election than to that of a Parliamentary General Election....The atmosphere of the election and, indeed, of debates in the Soviets themselves, is strangely remote from "politics" as Western democracies conceive them. A big family, animated by a single purpose, sits down on these occasions to administer its common property...The final stage in a Russian Election is the general meeting which adopts the candidates and gives them their mandates...I think that in any event unanimity would have been attained, which, indeed, is the purpose of elections in Russia."

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References

  1. Hugh D. Hudson Jr., Peasants, Political Police, and the Early Soviet State: Surveillance and Accommodation Under the New Economic Policy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 51.
  2. Dorothy Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905-1930, Sanford, CA: Sanford University Press, 1983, pp. 141, 280, 296, 298-299.
  3. The Voice of the People: Letters from the Soviet Village, 1918-1932, ed. C. J. Storella and A.K. Sokolov, New York: Yale University Press, 2012, p. 135.
  4. O. Velikanova, Popular Perceptions of Soviet Politics in the 1920s: Disenchantment of the Dreamers, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 22, 104, 120, 138, 140.
  5. Allan Todd, History for the IB Diploma Paper 3: The Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (1924-2000) (Second Edition), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 22, 24-25, 31-33,35, 37, 56, 155.
  6. Xenia Joukoff Eudin and Harold Henry Fisher, Soviet Russia and the West, 1920-1927: A Documentary Survey, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957, pp. 195, 264-265, 268, 269, 305, 306, 341.
  7. Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, London: Transaction Publishers, 2009, second printing, pp. 124, 127, 537.