Soviet Union legislative election, 1937

On 12 December 1937 elections were held to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. It was the first election held under the 1936 Soviet Constitution, which had formed the Supreme Soviet to replace the old legislature, the Congress of Soviets of the Soviet Union.

The Supreme Soviet was made up of two chambers, each of 750 deputies: the Soviet of the Union (one deputy per 300,000 citizens) and the Soviet of Nationalities (32 deputies from each union republic, 11 from each autonomous republic, 5 from each autonomous oblast, and 1 from each autonomous okrug).

The elections were originally announced as being multicandidate elections; however, by halfway through the year the announcement was reversed due to the suspiciousness of the leadership during the Great Purge. However during that early period a number of individuals attempted to make good on the multicandidate promise, including members of the Russian Orthodox Church who attempted to field religious candidates as a result of Article 124 of the new constitution, which promised freedom of religion. Many of the early individuals attempting to run as alternate candidates were arrested after the decision for multiple candidates was reversed. Additionally, the NKVD conducted mass arrests just prior to the election. According to Soviet law, 3.5 million out of an eligible adult population of 94.138 million were disenfranchised for various reasons. Of the remaining eligible population, 3,025,006 did not vote.

However, even with the mass arrests and with the tone more subdued than with the previous elections, there were still minor waves of dissent and opposition to candidates, especially those of major political figures (including Mikhail Kalinin, Anastas Mikoyan, and even Joseph Stalin himself) as well as celebrities (such as Aleksei Tolstoy) and candidates opposed on basis of ethnicity (such as ethnic Russians running in the Ukrainian SSR). There was still a sense of excitement, however, at the fact that they were the first elections held with the new constitution and that it was a major event due to that fact.

References

• "State and Society Under Stalin: Constitutions and Elections in the 1930s," article by J. Arch Getty in Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1991).
• The Distinctiveness of Soviet Law. Ferdinand Joseph Maria Feldbrugge, ed. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers: Dordrecht (1987): 110-112.
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1999. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 179–182.