The totalitarian terror of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was so repulsive that the
Communist Party itself denounced it after Stalin’s death, but when he died nothing about the
Soviet system legally changed.
The USSR had always claimed to be a democratic state.
So then, with Stalin gone, was it?
Did the Soviet government report to its millions of people?
And as it officially denounced the idea of having a state at all,
how did the Soviet Union actually work?
Well, the territory of the Soviet Union more-or-less
matched that of the former Russian Empire,
but it was internally divided into 15 republics, having grown from an original 4.
Officially called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it existed from the end of the
chaotic Russian Civil War, until 1991, when
its constituent parts became independent countries.
Before that though, on paper at least, they had all come together voluntarily.
The first four republics (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian SFSR, and the Byelorussian SSR)
had all agreed to sign the Treaty on the Creation of the Soviet Union,
but the latter three were puppets of Russia,
led by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party.
They had been created during the Russian Civil War after the Bolsheviks had crushed local
independence movements, and the freedom guaranteed to each nationality was more a matter of theatre
(or as Lenin might put it ‘democracy’), rather than representation.
Eventually, more ethnicities got the same treatment: Russian Central Asia was made into
five republics for the Uzbeks, Turkmens, Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Kirghiz.
Transcaucausia was reorganised as Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, and Moldavia were forcibly incorporated during World War 2.
By the mid-50s, the number of republics had stabilised at 15.
Each had a Supreme Soviet (or Supreme Council; a parliament in Western terms), and each was
also subdivided into increasingly smaller
and more specific districts with their own Soviets.
The Russian SFSR, being the largest republic by a mile, was the most complicated and it
contained about a dozen so-called Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics centred on local
nationalities within Russia.
A few also existed in the other republics.
Power, though, was really concentrated at the very top of two parallel hierarchies.
The ethnically based republics existed to maintain the illusion that the Soviet state
stood for international worker solidarity.
In practice, centralised government bureaucracy,
and the Bolsheviks, who were renamed the Communist Party, ruled the USSR.
That system, developed by Lenin, is usually called Soviet democracy or democratic centralism.
The USSR purported to be a socialist “Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” a stepping stone stage
in the left-wing, revolutionary ideology Marxism.
In it, workers, having seized the means of production, end capitalism and use a temporary
socialist system to create a fully state-less, class-less society: a Communist utopia.
But Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto over 70 years before the Soviet Union was
created, and Lenin added his own ideas to the original plan.
He championed the idea of Communist leaders taking charge as a Vanguard Party that could
wage class warfare on behalf of the workers.
Accordingly, the key tenets of democratic centralism were the forbidding of dissent
to ‘democratically(?)’ made decisions, and strict respect for authority.
Lenin died before he could fully implement his vision, and after him, the USSR reached
its totalitarian zenith under Joseph Stalin, who ruled as a one-man dictator.
That was unacceptable to the greater Communist Party, but the smart ones kept quiet about
it during Stalin’s life, and the rest were brutally purged.
Post-Stalin though, the Communist Party reasserted collective control, and returned to something
more like Lenin’s vision, and that lasted until the Soviet Union’s fall.
The two parallel institutions, the government, and the Communist Party,
were organised into pyramid hierarchies.
In theory, they were meant to be ran from the bottom up, with the lower bodies allocating
power to the smaller, higher ones, but in practice, the official government was subservient
to the party, and power in the Communist Party flowed from the top down.
Its executive arm, the Politburo, and the Secretariat, headed by the General Secretary
of the Communist Party, controlled the government.
The General Secretary was the de facto leader of the Soviet Union, and only the Party’s
central committee could potentially dismiss him or other members of the Politburo.
But of course, the Politburo’s members generally determined who was in the central committee.
All that said, in principle, democratic centralism allowed for discussion and debate
(just with the losers being bound to adopt the views of the majority)
and the Soviet government was elected.
The largest part of it was the Supreme Soviet of the whole Soviet Union, a parliament which
convened in the capital, Moscow.
It had two houses with 750 deputies each.
Both houses (the Soviets of the Union and the Nationalities) were elected, and the upper
house represented specific ethnicities, checking the Russian majority.
Which sounds all well and good; the catch was how those elections worked.
While everyone in the USSR could vote, every candidate for office had to be vetted and
approved by the Communist Party,
and then the approved candidate would be the only option listed on a ballot.
Voting was also done publicly—it wasn’t technically illegal to fill out a ballot in
private, but it was an obvious act of dissent and very rarely done.
Unsurprisingly, prospective candidates routinely won 99% of the vote.
Being elected to a Soviet was a way of rewarding party lackeys, and continuing the theatre
act of representation, not of holding anyone to account.
There were over 40,000 of them across the USSR by the 1970s though, elected at every
level from individual village councils to the Supreme Soviet itself.
The Communist Party also organised all across the country in the form of Primary Party Units
at virtually every factory, farm, or other business in the Soviet Union.
The PPUs were made up of loyal but ordinary party members who were responsible for ensuring
their enterprise met state-set economic targets.
They were usually small bodies, with a minimum size of three members,
but they were building blocks of the larger party.
The PPUs organised into larger district committees which formed about 150 regional committees,
which then elected the Republic-level Party Congresses, which together elected the All-Union
Party Congress.
Again though, in line with the ‘unity’ demanded by democratic centralism,
the job of all those organisations was to approve and acclaim
the decisions made higher up the ranks;
they ‘voted’ to approve what they were told to approve, and the All-Union Party
Congress gathered only every five years, leaving the Central Committee and the Politburo free
to exercise all of its theoretical power.
The Supreme Soviet also only met twice per year for about a week’s worth of work.
In reality, its functions were exercised by its much smaller committees:
the Praesidium and Council of Ministers.
The council basically being a cabinet appointed by the Supreme Soviet
(its chairman was technically the Prime Minister of the USSR)
and the Praesidium being the body responsible for choosing what the Supreme Soviet
would be voting on, and inevitably approving.
It functioned as sort of a collective head of state.
Both were controlled by the Politburo and Secretariat because, by choosing the candidates,
they decided who sat in the Supreme Soviet.
Was the Soviet Union really a democracy then?
Certainly! It was a true democracy!
By its own definition anyway.
Really, it operated as state where government institutions existed primarily to legitimise
the actions of one political party.
Marxism-Leninism, supposed to destroy class altogether, ended up creating an exclusive
self-perpetuating bureaucracy that ruled over the masses it claimed to represent.
Not that Russians had really been better off before their revolution.
To find out how the old Tsars of the Russian Empire managed their vast state—before Lenin
came along, obviously—you should check out the video on how the Russian Empire actually
worked to the left.
And as always, I’ve been James and I’ll see you there.