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%electi[s89,jmc]		The Soviet elections

Remarks:

1. I visited the Institute of Philosophy 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 from the Academy, elected a deputy, and attended a
rally for another candidate.  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.

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 not 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.  Sakharov,
Roald Sagdeev, and Shmeliev were not included among the nominees.
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 (Sagdeev, Shmeliev 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.  Sagdeev emphasized ``rule of law''.