Let us take first the formal facts of voting, though this is far from exhausting in the Soviet citizen’s participation in government. The Soviet Union has today the largest body of voters any where in the world. Moreover a larger percentage of them come out to elections than in any other country; they give more time to their elections and decide a greater variety of questions.
All “toilers” over the age of eighteen may elect and be elected; the word is interpreted to include students, housewives, old people who have passed the age of work as well as those more formally known as workers. Voting thus extends to a younger age than is common elsewhere, and there are no disqualifications for transient residents, paupers, migratory workers, soldiers, sailors, such as exist in most countries; even non-citizens may vote if they work in a Soviet industry. There are no restrictions for sex, creed or color, nor even for illiteracy. The only significant restriction relates to “exploiting elements,” but the steady decrease of privately owned enterprises has cut the disfranchised to 2.5 per cent of the population in the 1934 elections; by 1937 it is expected that all will have the vote. In the 1934 elections 91,000,000 people were entitled to vote, and of these 77,000,000, or 85 per cent, actually participated, which is double the proportion found in most countries.

Several elections which I attended will show concretely how soviet democracy functions. Four election meetings were held simultaneously in different hamlets of Gulin village, which had no assembly hall big enough for all. One of these meetings threw out the Party candidate, Borisov, because they felt that he neglected their instructions; they elected a non-Party woman who had displayed energy in improving the village and were praised by the election commissioner—himself a Party member—for having discovered good government timber which the Party had neglected. The central meeting in Gulin expected 235 voters; 227 appeared and were duly checked off by name at the door. There ensued personal discussion of every one of nine candidates, of whom seven were chosen. Mihailov “did good work on the roads.” The most enthusiasm developed over Menshina, a woman who “does everything assigned her energetically; checks farm property, tests seeds, collects state loans.” Dr. Sharkova, head of the Mothers’ Consultation, was pushed by the women: “We need a sanitary expert to clean up our village.” The incoming soviet was instructed to “increase harvest yield within two years to thirty bushels per acre, to organize a stud farm, get electricity and radio for every home, organize adult education courses, football and skiing teams, and satisfy a score of other needs.

Anna L. Strong, This Soviet World, Chapter IV: The Growing Democracy

The heads of government in America are not the real rulers. I have talked with many of them from the President down. Some of them would really like to use power for the people. They feel baffled by their inability to do so; they blame other branches of government, legislatures, courts. But they haven’t analyzed the real reason. The difficulty is that they haven’t power to use. Neither the President nor Congress nor the common people, under any form of organization whatever, can legally dispose of the oil of Rockefeller or the gold in the vaults of Morgan. If they try, they will be checked by other branches of government, which was designed as a system of checks and balances precisely to prevent such “usurpation of power.” Private capitalists own the means of production and thus rule the lives of millions. Government, however chosen, is limited to the function of making regulations which will help capitalism run more easily by adjusting relations between property and protecting it against the “lawless” demands of non-owners. This constitutes what Marxists call the dictatorship of property. “The talk about pure democracy is but a bourgeois screen,” says Stalin, “to conceal the fact that equality between exploiters and exploited is impossible. . . . It was invented to hide the sores of capitalism . . . and lend it moral strength.”

EPUB