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<text>
<title>
(Stalin) Stalin & Country:"Mobilization"
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--Stalin Portrait
</history>
<link 00046><link 00045><article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
December 20, 1937
"Mobilization"
</hdr>
<body>
<p> Russia, in the 21st year since her great Revolution, last
week celebrated her coming of age. Her celebration was to let her
people exercise the right of universal suffrage. For years
Russian workers have voted locally--in their councils or
Soviets--showing their hands under the watchful eyes of
Communist Party leaders, to elect representatives to a higher
soviet which in turn elected delegates to the next higher soviet,
the whole scheme being carefully worked out so that at the top
the votes of 25,000 townspeople counted as much as the votes of
125,000 country people, thereby keeping the conservative
peasantry under control. But last week Russia, having come of
age, allowed her people all the fun and trappings of a real
national election.
</p>
<p> Not only workers and peasants, but all Russians including
priests, bourgeois and ex-aristocrats--everyone sane, not
disenfranchised by the courts, not less than 18 years of age--were
invited to enjoy the pleasures of universal suffrage; to
vote man for man as equals; to elect not merely little men to
vote for bigger men, but to choose directly their own
representatives to the new Russian 1,143-member parliament, the
Verkovnyi Soviet or Supreme Council; to vote not in public by a
show of hands, but in private in a red-curtained booth, by secret
ballot according to their own convictions.
</p>
<p> "Depend on Stalin!" Russia's Dictator, famed for his heavy,
sardonic humor, was in his best form last week as constituents of
the Stalin district of Moscow jampacked a large theatre. They
looked for Candidate Stalin. He was not on the platform, packed
with lesser Bolsheviks. He was hidden in the depths of one of the
boxes. Finally he left his box, suddenly appeared on the stage.
The house went wild.
</p>
<p> "I had no intention of speaking. I have been dragged here by
force," Candidate Stalin was pleased ponderously to jest. "But so
long as I am here I may as well say something--although
everything already has been said by others!...Elections in
other countries are conducted as clashes of class against class.
There is pressure by the sharks of Capitalism! We have no
pressure here by the haves or have nots.... None can put
pressure on the people to manipulate the elections. That is why
our elections are the only free democratic elections in the
world.... Comrades, on my side I assure you you can depend on
Comrade Stalin to carry out his duty to workers, peasants and the
intelligentsia!"
</p>
<p> The Right People. The bright and shining coming-of-age gift
of universal suffrage and free democratic elections promised
Russia by Comrade Stalin's Constitution, being something new in
Russia, naturally did not take quite the form which it has in
Capitalist nations.
</p>
<p> Beginning last October, the process of nomination commenced
all over Russia at open meetings, with the nominating vote by
show of hands in the presence of local Communist officials. These
officials the Soviet press exhorted to "see that the right people
are chosen." Moscow observers noted not only that 712 of 1,143
constituencies nominated Stalin for Parliament but most of them
also went on to nominate as their candidates for parliament the
Dictator's eleven most favored colleagues. From Leningrad to
Vladivostok, from Samarkand to the Polar Cap this list of
favorite candidates was repeated, in many cases in the following
order: Premier Molotov; Heavy Industry Commissar Kaganovich;
Defense Commissar Voroshilov; President Kalinin; Communist Party
Central Committee Secretary Andreyev; Interior (Secret Police)
Commissar Yezhov; Finance Commissar Chubar; Communist Party
Central Executive Member Kosior; Leningrad Communist Leader
Zhdanov; Vice Premier & Supply Commissar Mikoyan; President of
the Ukrainian Soviet Republic Petrovsky; and Candidate x, locally
prominent.
</p>
<p> "Who Against Stalin?" Under the Electoral Law no candidate
may run for more than one Russian parliamentary seat, and Stalin,
the perennial nominee, withdrew his candidacy in all
constituencies except the Stalin district of Moscow. "Who will
feel like competing with Comrade Stalin [in the Stalin
district]?" asked Komsomolskaya Pravda, organ of the Communist
Youth, and its editor "guessed" that all the other candidates in
the Stalin district "probably" would withdraw. They did. Nearly
two years ago Joseph Stalin told an interviewer: "You are puzzled
by the fact that only one party will come forward at the
elections. You think there will be no election contests. But
there will be, and I foresee very lively election campaigns!"
This year, however, Candidate Stalin made no personal campaign
whatever.
</p>
<p> The example set in the Stalin district was rapidly followed
all over the Soviet Union, candidates everywhere withdrawing in
favor of the candidate favored by the Communist Party and the
Stalin State. In all Russia last week there were only two
constituencies in which there was more than one candidate--all
the rest were bound to be elected no matter what 100,000,000
voters did with their secret ballots.
</p>
<p> Get-Out-The-Vote. Under these circumstances the cost of
145,000,000 ballots, of pencils, voting booths, ballot boxes, of
supervising the count--perhaps $25,000,000--might have been
saved.
</p>
<p> To the popular question: "What is the use of my going to
vote? There is only one candidate, and he will be elected
anyway!" President Kalinin recently retorted: "It is a grave
mistake to think this.... If in our country in a number of
places candidates withdraw their names for the benefit of some
candidate, it is the result of their social kinship and common
political purpose.... It is a sign of socialism--a sign of
the impossibility of differences among the working masses, such
as there are in bourgeois society."
</p>
<p> On the eve of polling last week, Defense Commissar Klimentiy
("Klim") Voroshilov and his Marshals and Generals of the Red Army
cracked out speeches all over Russia in their hoarse, parade-
ground voices, calling the election "our Mobilization!" and
making vigorous efforts to get out the vote.
</p>
<p> "In our ranks there can be no place for traitors!" bellowed
Klim before an audience of 120,000 at Minsk. "We will carry on
this struggle until all the enemies of the people and all the
enemies of Socialism are destroyed completely! Let those who
think to hamper the victorious march of many millions and masses
of fighters for our new life know and remember well that THEY
WILL BE DESTROYED LIKE WORMS!"
</p>
<p> "We have enemies," admitted Premier Molotov, "among the
people. However, we have learned to expose them! The Trotskyists
and others are living their last days."
</p>
<p> As a final and more effective way of getting out the vote
the state press made an astonishing last-minute somersault.
Soviet editors have been telling Russians for months about how
the secret ballot, "that great boon conferred by Stalin, Our
Sun," will protect them. The 100,000,000 prospective voters have
been warned that of course they must not write their names on
these secret ballots, that any ballot would be invalidated if so
signed or marked that the voter revealed his identity. Suddenly
upon this point the Soviet press reversed, proclaimed last week
under banner headlines that every voter was privileged to sign
the ballot, thus proving his or her individual loyalty to
Bolshevism and to Stalin, thus giving all citizens the privilege
not only of casting a useless ballot, but of usefully registering
themselves as supporters of the right people.
</p>
<p> People's Choice. If all these things did not quite measure
up to the U.S. idea of a free democratic election, they were
nonetheless quite a big enough dose for Russian minds and Russian
methods to cope with. Getting ballots and pencils to the places
where they were needed was a big job and there were occasional
slips of the new electoral machinery as when, in Simferopol, one
of the polling places designated was a house torn down some
months ago; in Rostov-on-Don where a polling booth was placed
inside a cinema so that it was necessary to buy a ticket to the
show in order to vote.
</p>
<p> The candidates did their best at the unaccustomed game of
electioneering. In Moscow, one Ivan Gudov, candidate,
electioneered by announcing that two days before the election he
turned out on his lathe "4,852% more work than I am supposed to
do in a day!" In Leningrad, the local head of the Secret Police,
Leonid Zakowsky, issued a handbill urging his election which
said: "Our people are confident of their fate and their country
because they now have experienced and tested their police and
detective forces!" The voters also did their best, in Stalin's
district they wrote slogans like HURRAH FOR COMRADE STALIN! on
their ballot envelopes, and elsewhere only a few such extremists
as those in Uzbekistan went so far as to murder their wives or
strip them naked in order to save them from contamination in the
new rite of universal suffrage.
</p>
<p> Although Russians still have their mail tampered with, their
telephones tapped, and are still likely to be waked up in the
night to be carted off to jail without warrant or due process of
law, it was a first step toward their education in democracy when
Stalin's constitution labeled these things unconstitutional. So
likewise it was education last week to 100,000,000 Russians to
find that they were entitled--in theory--to walk into a
polling booth and choose without coercion the men who are to
govern them.
</p>
<p> Stalin's Milestone. The record of Joseph Stalin is all
action. Other Communists at the opening of the 20th Century
theorized, but the swarthy Georgian and his band bombed Tsarist
officials and robbed banks, sending money abroad to Lenin &
Trotsky, crisp banknotes which the go-between Litvinoff carried
in his little satchel. In 1918, during the civil war with the
White Russians, pugnacious Disciple Stalin, describing the
difficulties of keeping his Communist troops together, wrote to
the Master Lenin: "I drive and scold everyone who needs it."
</p>
<p> Since the death of Lenin in 1924 and the expulsion of
Trotsky, Stalin has driven and scolded 166,000,000 Russians to
equip the Soviet Union with fairly adequate heavy industry, to
collectivize Russian farms, to build an army, to fulfill
successive Five Year Plans. The cost of these successes has been
measured in the execution of thousands, and the exile to Siberia
and the Polar North of hundreds of thousands who resisted his
driving and scolding. To Stalin as to his people this week's
election is a milestone. Last year, when he gave them their
Constitution, its terms made clear that the time had come when
his driving and scolding could give place to leadership. Before
the election took place he had evidently revised his theory for
the time being. How capable Russia's ignorant masses are of
assimilating democratic doctrine, how capable Joseph Stalin is of
permitting them to do so in fact still remains to be demonstrated
by the experiment of last week's election.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>