Russia Profile
March 5, 2008
Compelled to Vote
The Struggle for Attendance and Political Idiocy
Comment by Georgy Bovt
I remember during the Soviet era, when I was a student in the history department of Moscow State University, there was an election to the Supreme Soviet. I don’t remember exactly what year it was. We had two female students who lived in the dorms that did not go to vote. Not for any ideological reasons, the girls had some especially hot party the night before and could not wake up on time, or something of the sort. The next day both girls were called to the Komsomol Committee for a “trial hearing.” To make matters worse, one of the girls was a Komsomol activist, so her failure to attend the election was seen as a particularly malicious dissident act. Both were threatened with expulsion from Komsomol and from the department. But somehow the situation was worked out. I think the hard drinking the night before and their consequent hangovers were deemed justifiable excuses.
In general, during the Soviet times election attendance was a very strict matter. Even in the later years of Soviet regime, people were afraid to sit out the vote. (During the Stalin era that was something you could easily be arrested and sent to labor camp for, if not executed.)
If you did not attend, a note could be sent to your workplace and employers had the authority to take measures against the “irresponsible citizens.” Although in the later years of the Soviet regime, this was true mostly for representatives of the intelligentsia. It was practically impossible to punish working class people for not voting (without any special manifestation of protest), because there was nothing that the workers and peasants could be deprived of. At that time, even taking away pay bonuses for failure to attend an election was no longer practiced. But still, people were afraid of the authorities “just in case,” and attended the elections en masse. To be more exact, they voted for candidates appointed by the Communist Party without really thinking about the absolutely undemocratic process.
Nowadays, we often hear that zealous officials in different regions of our country almost openly threaten with retribution those who don’t attend the election. Surprisingly, they say they will take away salary bonuses or even fire an employee or expel a student from college. There were quite a few reports of this type of activity during the December Duma election and they continued on March 2 during presidential elections.
Most witness accounts tell of verbal orders from superiors to go and vote and then report back in some form. For example, to call from the polling station, or, more rarely, to photograph your marked ballot with your cell phone, or to take an absentee ballot and vote at the workplace, etc.
On Election Day representatives of the Communist Party reported, for example, that they heard from cadets of the Military Medical Academy in the Vyborg district of St. Petersburg that the cadets were instructed to fill out the ballots and then, before dropping them into the boxes, to show them, unfolded, to their superior officers.
I can sympathize with the cadets. They are dependent people and being in the barracks makes it hard for them to stand up for their civil rights to free declaration of will, including the right to choose whether to go and vote.
However, there are a few things I cannot understand. For example, why are people so subservient to their bosses, even when and where the latter, if you give it just a little thought, simply cannot control them.
For example, an acquaintance of mine, who works in a large hospital in Perm, wrote to me. They had orders (verbal, of course) from the hospital chiefs to not give any medical records or certificates to any patients until they cast their votes in the election. There was also a number of reports from medical institutions in connection with the fall Duma election about how voting was in some way or other tied to providing medical services.
The efficiency of such coercion makes no sense. If Dmitry Medvedev was running alone in this election, the logic of such administrators could be understood at least at some level. But, when there are formally three other candidates, anybody you force to vote can just vote for somebody else, or spoil the ballot, simply out of spite. This is impossible to control. Secondly, it is still very hard to imagine a situation when a person who openly expresses his outrage and rejects such demands would really be refused to be checked out of a hospital or given medical documents, or even butchered on the operating table “as punishment.”
It is also difficult to imagine any senior management really installing hidden cameras to find out how the employees of an organization are voting and whether they are voting at all.
Nevertheless, there are no mass protest actions by patients, and all the employees obediently say, “Yes, we will call you and report on how we voted.” Everybody knows that this kind of control over election attendance is pure profanation and has no meaning apart from the bosses’ desire to report to a certain organization, saying that the people are happy with the regime and are marching off to vote.
Essentially, during the Soviet era, election attendance was identified with direct support for the regime, because the elections carried no choice. Today they formally have alternatives, and high turnout rates alone do not demonstrate that all these people really support the Vladimir Putin-Dmitry Medvedev course and are not voting for Andrei Bogdanov (thus secretly making a gesture of protest).
Nevertheless, almost everybody continues to play this strange conformist game. They justify themselves by saying they play it out of fear. Actually, it is out of almost complete indifference toward Russia’s political processes.
Some reassurance comes from one fact. It seems that for the presidential election the regional authorities did not receive any strict “norms” – neither for the attendance rates nor for the number of “desired votes” cast in favor of Dmitry Medvedev. Maybe in time, if the authorities continue to follow the same line of behavior, it will lead to at least a partial decrease of political and administrative idiocy on location in the regions.
And then maybe there will come a time for the next logical steps toward developing a democracy. For example, maybe they will think about having some real alternatives in the elections, that is, to have the elections demonstrate the presence of real political competition. By the way, in that case political parties themselves, and not hospital department heads, will fight for high attendance rates. And they will do so not by giving orders, but by offering substantial platforms.