RUSSIA: Looking Outward

It was the biggest, most meaningless election on earth. From Archangel to Erivan, from Kënigsberg to the Kurils, almost 100 million citizens of great Russia voted this week in their first national election in eight years.

For weeks past, with unaccustomed candor, party chiefs had been talking to the people. The campaign keynote was fear of the world outside.

The Enemy, Capitalism. Candidate Lazar M. Kaganovich asserted flatly: “We are still within the capitalist encirclement.” Candidate Viacheslav Molotov warned: Russia is watchful of “possible hotbeds . . . intrigues against international security. . . . Everything must be done to make the Red Army as good as the armies of other countries.”

In Moscow, the day before the election, Candidate Joseph Stalin, surrounded by flowers, droned through his first speech in six months. World War II, he said, was the “inevitable result of development of world economic and political forces on a basis of monopolistic capitalism. . . . The catastrophe of war might be avoided if it were possible to make periodic redistribution of raw materials and markets. . . . But this is impossible under present conditions of capitalistic development. . . . The Soviet social system is a better form of organization of society than any other non-Soviet social system.”

Without mentioning the atomic bomb, Stalin promised that Soviet scientists would “not only catch up with but . . . surpass” those abroad. He stressed the role of industry in war, proclaimed that the new five-year plan must work toward production increases big enough “to guarantee our country against any eventuality.”

Ultimately the nation would have to produce an annual 60 million tons of steel, 500 million tons of coal, 60 million tons of oil,* but these goals might require three more five-year plans.

Stalin’s speech contained no threats. It was dry in tone, defensive in content. But its truculent exaggeration of the danger of attack from the capitalist world was the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day. The world Communist line, “soft” during the war, has been gradually hardening into a return to the tactics and slogans of world revolution. Comrades everywhere could be expected to take a tip from Uncle Joe’s speech and sharpen their opposition to non-Communist governments.

Yet Stalin may have had purely Russian reasons for pointing outward toward imagined enemies. Restless Russians have been asking for more food, clothes and “luxuries.” Although Stalin in his speech announced that food rationing would soon end, the foreign menace is still his handiest excuse for low living standards.

The Choice. Candidate Stalin headed the slate of Communist Party and Communist-picked nonparty men. Though the results are never in doubt, Soviet elections are taken most seriously. Communist party workers scurry about factories, farms and homes, going through a complicated “primary-election” sifting process that gives millions of Russians the illusion that they participate in their country’s government.

Recited Aaron Sharov glowingly to a Moscow meeting: “I … a toolmaker of the seventh category . . . propose the candidacy of our beloved Comrade Stalin.” The chairman intoned a Soviet litany: “[We] nominate the true continuer of the cause of Lenin, the wise leader of the Soviet people, the creator of the might of our he “land, the organizer and inspirer of the historic victory over Fascist Germany and Imperial Japan, the brilliant Army leader, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.” The press pitched into the campaign. One day Pravda would report that American women were being forced into prostitution by unemployment, the next day it would prove authoritatively that the Soviet was “the only real people’s government in the world.”

In 1,287 districts, covering a sixth of the globe, voters registered unmarked papers to approve the official list, marked papers to disapprove. Only if half the electors scratched a candidate’s name from the ballot paper could the Communist ticket lose. It did not lose. Stalin himself got a 100% vote in his own Moscow precinct.

* Estimated 1944 production: 16.5 million tons of steel, 170 million tons of coal, 38 million tons of oil.