Opinion: The Soviet Union had a competitive election 30 years ago. Russians are still fighting for one.
Soviet physicist, dissident, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and newly elected deputy Andrei Sakharov addresses the inaugural session of the Congress of People's Deputies in the presence of chairman of the presidium of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow on May 25, 1989. By Vladimir Kara-Murza DemocracyPost contributor March 27 at 1:48 PM On Sunday, opposition supporters in St.
By normal standards, that election was anything but democratic. Of the 2,250 lawmakers, 750 were hand-picked by the Communist Party and its satellite “public organizations” such as the Young Communist League and the Soviet Women’s Committee. A further 399 seats were filled in Soviet-style single-candidate “elections.” Competition in the remaining 1,101 districts came with a caveat, a “filter” of its time.
“He … told dangerous things to that assembly of Communists,” recalls Viktor Lysov, a democratic activist who attended the meeting. “He spoke about private property, about a multiparty system.” Reporting on the meeting, the local Communist newspaper called Nemtsov “a troublemaker”; the district assembly duly blocked him from the ballot.
In a stunning humiliation for the Communist Party, 38 of its regional first secretaries lost in their districts. And, although the Communists still held 87 percent of the seats, forming what opposition legislator Yuri Afanasyev termed “an aggressively obedient majority,” the most important outcome of the election was the formation of the Soviet Union’s first-ever parliamentary opposition.
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