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C00002 00002	%electi[s89,jmc]		The Soviet elections
C00019 00003	\smallskip\centerline{Copyright \copyright\ 1989\ by John McCarthy}
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%electi[s89,jmc]		The Soviet elections
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\title{NOTES ON THE MARCH 1989 SOVIET ELECTIONS}


\noindent Remarks:

1. The purpose of my two weeks in Moscow was to lecture on artificial
intelligence at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of
Sciences in accordance with an exchange agreement on ``computers
and philosophy'' between Stanford University and that institute.
Vladimir Lifschitz of Stanford, a mathematical logician, who emigrated
from the Soviet Union in 1977 was my companion in this visit.

Our visit took place in the interval between the first and second
rounds of elections.  I met two electors from institutes of the
Academy of Sciences and had long discussions.  I also met one
candidate, Roald Sagdeyev, from the Academy, who was subsequently
elected a deputy, and attended a rally of the Moscow People's
Front.  I also talked with many people in the scientific
community.  Besides that I read the newspapers.

2. I think the present Soviet election law is a work of gimcrack
genius.  It maximizes the political activation of many parts of the
Soviet population, and this activation will continue for a several
years unless the electoral {\it perestroika}is reversed by some
kind of coup.  It does this by the creation of political anomalies
and stresses of all kinds.

3. First a description.  The People's Congress, now almost completely elected,
contains 2250 deputies.  750 are elected by districts of presumably
equal population.  750 are elected by districts with equal representation
of the 15 Soviet republics, presumably by equal population districts
within each republic.  750 are elected by ``social organizations''.  The
Communist Party has 100, the trade unions have 100, the Komsomol has
75, the Women's movement has 75, the Academy of Sciences has 20, the
Peace Movement has some, and the stamp collectors have 1.
The term of the Congress is five years.

The People's Congress has two (maybe three) functions. First it
elects a President.  Presumably this will be Gorbachev without
much trouble, although there is talk of running Yeltsin against
him.  Second it chooses 542 of its members to be a Supreme Soviet
that will be in permanent session like a real parliament or Congress.
The People's Congress meets for a few days once a year and replaces
1/5 of the Supreme Soviet each year.  One person told me that the
People's Congress will also elect a First Deputy Premier, but I
didn't hear about that from other sources.  If so, it will be
an object of contention.

4. Some of the elections were genuinely contested, and others
were old-fashioned Soviet one candidate elections.  Of the
latter, some went through as usual, but in others the single
candidate was rejected.  This happened in Leningrad and Kiev, so
it's important.  This is one anomaly.  Some deputies have genuine
mandates and will look down on those who have only
pseudo-mandates.  Some of the voters will have a feeling of
having made a genuine choice, while others will feel that the
opportunity was missed.

Boris Yeltsin was elected by an all-Moscow Russian nationality
district.  He will have only one vote out of 2250, but his 89 percent
victory in Moscow involved getting 5.1 million votes.  There
will be great interest in his speeches.

5. The Academy of Sciences elections also produced great activation
in the institutes that I visited.  There were two controversies
before the first round.  First there was the question of who got
to vote.  The electoral law doesn't say who gets to vote for the
representatives of the ``social organizations''.  G. I. Marchuk,
the President of the Academy and somewhat of a protege of Ligachev,
proposed that only members and corresponding members should vote.
After protest, the Presidium agreed that there should also be
one elector for each 150 scientists, elected in each institute by
its staff.  The second controversy involved nominations.  Andrey Sakharov,
Roald Sagdeyev, and Nikolai Shmelyov were not included among the nominees.
Their partisans then recommended voting no on most of the candidates.
The result was that only 8 of the Academy's places were filled in
the first round.  No other candidates received majorities, so that
new nominations and elections for these 12 places were required.
Marchuk gave in on this, the three mentioned above were nominated
and elected.  There was a lot of politicking associated with these
elections, because there were nominating sessions in each institute.
Thus Sakharov was nominated by 185 institutes.

One can imagine, however, that some institutes behaved in a routine
way, resulting in dissatisfaction once some of their members
discovered what happened in the more active places.

Incidentally, Marchuk was chosen as a delegate of the Communist
Party and didn't have to run, but so was Tatiana Zaslavskaya, one
of the leading liberal sociologists and theorist of {\it perestroika}.

6. The Peace Movement election had one anomaly that I heard of.
Georgi Arbatov, Director of the Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada,
was nominated but was denounced as one of the ``architects of the
Brezhnev policy of stagnation'' in an illegally distributed leaflet
at the time of the Peace Movement election.  It was illegal, because
electioneering on election day was forbidden.  While Arbatov received
51 percent of the votes, he wasn't elected, because enough other
candidates received more.  He was then nominated and elected as
one of the Academy of Science's deputies.  Presumably, the Peace
Movement is basically window-dressing as an organization, and its
nominal leadership wasn't chosen with the idea that they would ever
have a genuine decision to make.

7. The fact that the stamp collectors elect a deputy was often
pointed out as an undemocratic feature of the election law.
It's one more thing that will keep the political pot boiling.
(As an aside, the stamp collectors' delegate should demand the
revival of Tannu Tuva.  Tannu Tuva was a nominally independent
country bordering the Soviet Union and Mongolia between the
Revolution and World War II, when Stalin gobbled it up.  While
it existed, it produced beautiful triangular stamps.)

8. What were the issues?  The candidates produced platforms, and the
three I saw (Sagdeyev, Shmelyov and Arbatov) differed substantially.
Yeltsin also had a written platform.  It included calls for substantial
reductions in expenditures on defense and space.

I was told that the candidates who emphasized democracy did better
than candidates who emphasized bread and butter issues.  What did
they mean by democracy?  As far as I could see, they meant by democracy
what we in the West mean by it, freedom of speech and press and free
elections.  There was nothing about socialist democracy being superior
to bourgeois democracy.  Sagdeyev emphasized ``rule of law''.

9. The conservative side is still in disarray and has no platform.
When I remarked on this to one elector from the Institute of
Philosophy, he referred to the Andreyeva letter.  This letter,
nominally from a Leningrad chemistry teacher and
said to have been instigated by Ligachev, appeared in the
conservative newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya early in 1988 while
Gorbachev was out of town.  It denounced {\it glasnost} and
 {\it perestroika} and caused considerable fear when it was
reprinted in several other newspapers, because letters from
``ordinary'' people had often signalled the start of campaigns
in the past.  However, the letter was denounced by {\it Pravda}
a few weeks later.  One of {\it Pravda}'s most significant
comments cited to me was ``But comrades, we already tried that''.

However, as platform it has two weaknesses.  First, not one
political figure has publically admitted agreeing with it.
Second, it has no positive proposals.

It seems to me that without a positive proposal of some kind,
the conservatives' only chance is a coup of some kind.
There is no evidence that they are prepared to attempt that.

10. At the Moscow People's Front rally I noticed a poster
inviting Communist Party members to an organizing meeting
of a Party group for {\it perestroika}.  Would-be attendees
were asked to bring their Party membership cards.  When I
remarked that this looked to me like the formation of
a faction (illegal according to Party statutes), it was
explained to me that the matter had been looked into and
was entirely ok.  This suggests that the pressure from
below is such that the rules of ``democratic centralism''
are being bent.

\noindent Some Conclusions

1. The further development of the Soviet political process and the
role of elections in it are not predictable at present.
There is no reason to suppose that even Gorbachev can predict
the consequences of his actions.

2. The electoral law and the subsequent elections in the republics
and localities will keep the political pot boiling.

3. The Supreme Soviet in permanent session is likely to develop
significant factions.  Even members who have given no previous
sign of political independence are likely to be influenced by
oratory and to form political groups.

4. The West cannot influence this process much, so we might as well
relax and see what happens .  The people involved in
the Soviet electoral process are absorbed in it and aren't
paying much attention to what the West is saying.  Maybe
they will be influenced by events in China, but no-one
mentioned these events in my discussions.

5. The theory that the Soviets cannot have genuine politics
because of their history is mistaken.  It was tyranny, not
tradition, that preserved the oppressive Soviet regime.
There may be fundamental differences in the personalities
of Soviet people from Westerners that affect the political
possibilities, but it certainly isn't obvious what they
might be.

6. The theory that Gorbachev will be overthrown unless {\it
perestroika} fixes the economy in a short time seems to be wrong.
There is no serious rival set of proposals.  Maybe people
think that if they can't get prosperity, they might as well
have democracy.

7. Economic policy is likely to be a major issue.  Because
of the distorted economic system, some of the co-operatives
have made windfall profits by exploiting opportunities.
The bureaucratic reaction has often been to forbid and
confiscate the profits rather than reduce them by allowing
more competition.  Some understand the matter and others
don't.
\smallskip\centerline{Copyright \copyright\ 1989\ by John McCarthy}
\smallskip\noindent{This draft of ELECTI[S89,JMC]\ TEXed on \jmcdate\ at \theTime}
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