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The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, abbreviated Politbureau CC CPSS or simply Politbureau, was the highest political body of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and de facto a collective presidency of the USSR. It was founded in October 1917, and refounded in March 1919, at the 8th Congress of the Bolshevik Party. It was known as the Presidium from 1952 to 1966. The Politburo's authority was significantly undermined during the August coup and subsequently ended three months later upon its dissolution in 1991.
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."
References
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1999. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 180–182.
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