This book was written to answer letters. Its preface explains that "readers abroad have shown a keen interest in the day-to-day functions of the Soviets, as is apparent from the numerous letters sent to Progress Publishers," and that "it is in response to these requests that the present book was published." That single sentence tells us what kind of object we are holding. It is not the internal polemic that its close sibling in this series, Topornin and Machulsky's Socialism and Democracy (Progress, 1974), turned out to be — a "Reply to Opportunists" aimed at reform communists inside the bloc. It is an export primer: a patient, procedural, almost administrative description of how the Soviets of Working People's Deputies are elected, convened and run, prepared for the sympathetic foreign inquirer who wanted to know how the system actually works. That difference of address matters, because it changes where the finding lies. Socialism and Democracy argues, and can be caught arguing badly. The Soviet Form of Popular Government mostly describes — and it is in what the description includes and what it silently leaves out that the book gives itself away.
It is a collective work with a named front man. The title page presents V. M. Chkhikvadze, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and Director of the Academy's Institute of State and Law, as principal editor; the book, its own note says, "was compiled under the direction of" Chkhikvadze, with contributions from "experts on Soviet state law and the organisation of Soviets" — assistant professors M. A. Shafir and Y. N. Umansky, and candidates of law B. V. Chernov, V. M. Koldayev and O. Y. Kutafin. It was translated by James Riordan and edited by Murad Saifulin, who also edited this series' Soviet Socialist Democracy and Socialism and Democracy — the same hand shaping the whole cluster of "socialist democracy" titles for English readers. The Russian original, given on the reverse of the title page, was Sovety — organy narodovlastiya v SSSR: "the Soviets — organs of the people's rule in the USSR." The English title softens narodovlastie, "the people's rule," into "popular government," but the claim is the hard one: that here the people actually govern.
For once the date can be taken more or less at face value. There is no printing history in the front matter and no earlier edition announced in the text; the copyright line reads simply "© Progress Publishers 1972," "First printing 1972." The internal evidence agrees. The latest Party congress the book leans on is the Twenty-Fourth (1971), whose decisions on "extend[ing] greatly the powers of the Soviets" it repeatedly invokes; it cites the 1970 elections to the Eighth Supreme Soviet and the June 1971 local elections as recent facts; its one forward date is the 1971–1975 Five-Year Plan, correctly named as current. This is a genuine document of 1972, not an older manuscript in a newer jacket — which fixes the world against which it should be read. Notably, and unlike its 1974 sibling, the book never once uses the phrase "developed socialism," the Brezhnev-era formula that became the theoretical spine of Socialism and Democracy. Its organising category is older and simpler: the Soviet itself, and the doctrine that the dictatorship of the proletariat has "become the political organisation of the whole nation under the guidance of the working class."
The book's central claim is that the Soviets are "the most explicit expression and personification of socialist democracy… the most simple, most democratic and, at the same time, the most sovereign and effective system of representative institutions the world has ever known." Democracy here means real popular power — "government of the people and for the people," in which "life's creators had become its masters." That is the highest claim a state can make about itself, and it invites the test this series has come to rest its judgements on, in preference to word-counts or missing footnotes: error is admissible, the category is not. A Soviet book may concede that this or that official blundered, that methods were "formal and bureaucratic," that harsh measures were taken; what it will never do is let the analytic category it wields against its enemies — that behind formal power can lie real powerlessness — be turned on its own state. So the questions are two. Does the book's own idea of democracy, real popular power against merely formal rights, ever get pointed homeward, at a one-party state that permitted no opposition, no contested election, no free press, no independent union and no right to strike? And when the book names the dictatorship of the proletariat, does it ever allow that this might have become a dictatorship over the proletariat, a bureaucracy ruling in the workers' name?
To both, the book's answer is not a bad argument. It is silence. And because this is a descriptive book, the silence is unusually clean and unusually total. Socialism and Democracy at least named the Prague Spring, if only to invert it; it staged the multi-party objection in order to knock it down; it let the Austrian communist Franz Marek state the case that the Party rules over the workers, in order to wave it away. Chkhikvadze's volume does none of this. It runs the words one-party, multi-party, opposition (in the political sense), Czechoslovakia, Prague, dissent, Trotsky, Stalin and self-management to almost nothing. It does not argue with its critics because it does not admit that they exist. The reader who wrote in from abroad is shown a working model of a democracy with no friction in it anywhere.
The word "opposition" occurs exactly once in the book, and its single use is worth the whole vocabulary it displaces. It appears in a passage on the federal structure: "the USSR contains no opposition of centre to localities; there exists no contradiction between the highest and lowest authorities." Opposition, in this book, is a purely spatial notion — friction between tiers of an administrative machine — and its absence is a boast. Political opposition, opposition as the right to organise against the government of the day, is not denied or refuted; it is simply not a category the book possesses. A volume on democracy in which the only opposition conceivable is the kind you would want to eliminate has told you, in one sentence, what it means by the word.
The same evacuation governs the treatment of 1968. The year appears fifteen times in the text, and every one is domestic housekeeping: the recall of 541 local Soviet deputies "in 1968"; the Presidium Ordinance of 12 April 1968 on the handling of citizens' complaints; the "new legislative enactments on the rural and township Soviets adopted in 1968." Czechoslovakia — the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968 that crushed an attempt to build the very "socialism with a human face" this book claims already to embody, four years before it went to press — is absent. This is not a book that could not know. It is a book by Soviet jurists, published in Moscow, in which 1968 means an ordinance on paperwork and never means Prague. Where its sibling inverted the event, this one deletes it. The finding, as the brief for this series puts it, is not any single falsehood but the asymmetry: across the whole volume the Party and its Soviets are only ever the subject perfecting democracy, never the object of a doubt about it.
Because the book is a manual, its most revealing passages are not arguments but instructions — and it is here, in the loving procedural detail, that it convicts itself without meaning to. Take the chapter on elections, the longest sustained description in the volume. It sets out, correctly and at length, the guarantees of Soviet suffrage: universal, equal, direct, by secret ballot; single-member districts of equal population; no property deposit; polling on a non-working day from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.; screened booths that even electoral-commission members may not enter. And it reports the results with pride: "in June 1971, 99.95 per cent of all electors voted in the elections to local Soviets; over 99 per cent voted for candidates of the popular bloc of Communists and non-Party people"; in the 1970 Supreme Soviet elections "153,172,213 persons, or 99.96" of the electorate. A figure of 99.96 per cent is offered as "positive proof of their political consciousness." It is nothing of the kind. A turnout that never varies and a vote that is never divided are not measures of participation but of its abolition; the number is high precisely because there was nothing to decide.
The book knows this objection is coming, and — to its credit for candour, and its cost for the argument — it states it in the reader's own words. "The fact that only one candidate is nominated," it writes, "may cause people to wonder whether this in any way inhibits electoral freedom." Its answer is that "the number of candidates nominated in electoral districts is legally unlimited," and that "the various organisations can and do nominate several candidates for one and the same electoral district." Then the turn: "But, by virtue of the fact that the USSR contains no hostile classes and no competing political rivals, mass organisations are able to agree on a single candidate." So there is no legal bar to a second candidate; there is simply, always, only one. "The upshot of all these preparations is that only one nominee is registered in each electoral district… This in no way infringes upon the citizens' freedom of choice." The reader is asked to accept that a ballot with one name on it is the fullest form of choice because society has grown too harmonious to want a second.
That "no hostile classes and no competing political rivals" is the load-bearing clause of the whole book, and it is not the authors' invention. It is Stalin's, almost word for word, and it was demolished in advance — which is the discovery that makes this volume more interesting than its blandness suggests.
Before the demolition, the book deserves the credit this series owes any volume, because a reader told everything here is worthless learns nothing. The soviet form that Chkhikvadze describes is not a Stalinist fabrication. It is one of the genuine democratic inventions of the modern workers' movement, and revolutionary Marxists hold it dear. The book is right that the Soviets grew out of the strike committees of 1905 and 1917 — "from being strike-leading bodies the Soviets grew… into organs of the general revolutionary struggle" — and right that this origin gave them a form superior, in principle, to parliamentarism. It quotes Lenin accurately on the point. In the soviet type of body, "the parliamentarians themselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have themselves to test the results achieved in reality, and to account directly to their constituents… there is no parliamentarism here as a special system, as the division of labour between the legislative and the executive, as a privileged position for the deputies." Deputies who keep their jobs and serve unpaid; the fusion of legislature and executive; the binding mandate; the right of recall that Lenin called "the truly popular nature of the Soviets" — these are the features of the Paris Commune that Marx praised and that Lenin sought to revive, and the book is entitled to claim them as a higher democratic idea than a parliament of professional politicians insulated from those they govern.
The book's negative case has the same real content. Its critique of purely formal democracy — that political equality can coexist with, and mask, economic domination; that the soviet form dissolves the separation of powers behind which "an omnipotent state apparatus actually decides affairs of state behind a facade of representative bodies" — is a serious argument with a long Marxist pedigree, and it is not answered by indignation. The freedom of the press is, in large measure, the freedom of those who own presses; a parliament can be a screen. Revolutionary socialists made these arguments before there was a Soviet Union and make them still. The council idea, and the critique of the parliamentary shell, are the honest core of the book.
The trouble is not that this instrument is blunt. It is that it is sharp, and only ever pointed one way. Every one of the commune-democratic features the book celebrates is described as a living reality of the USSR of 1972, when each had been hollowed into its opposite. The recall right that expresses "the truly popular nature of the Soviets" is exercised against individual local deputies "who betray their trust" — 541 of them in 1968 — but never against the apparatus that selects the single candidate in the first place; you may recall the man on the ballot, not the hand that wrote the ballot. The Lenin formula that there is "no privileged position for the deputies" is printed by a state whose managerial-political stratum, the nomenklatura, was precisely a privileged position, with access to goods and housing the ordinary voter never saw. The soviets that grew out of strike committees belong to the one industrial state on earth where a strike was not a right but a punishable act — the word "strike" occurs nine times in this book and every occurrence is the pre-revolutionary or foreign kind, the thing workers did to create the Soviets, never a thing they might do under them. The institution born of the strike had outlawed the strike, and the book does not notice.
This is the bait-and-switch on which the volume runs, and it is the same one its 1974 sibling runs, arrived at from the other direction: establish that formal rights can conceal real powerlessness, exhibit the genuine superiority of the council form, and then forbid anyone to ask whether Soviet rights and Soviet councils had themselves become formal. The critique of the parliamentary facade is pressed into service to gild a facade of its own.
The answer to this book was written in 1936, and it answers not its conclusions in general but its machinery in particular. In The Revolution Betrayed, composed in the months the Stalin Constitution was being drafted, Trotsky devoted the chapter "In the Mirror of the New Constitution" to exactly the electoral apparatus Chkhikvadze would describe with pride thirty-six years later. Against the single candidate defended by the withering of classes, Trotsky had already set down Stalin's own version of the argument — "there can be no nourishing soil for the creation of parties struggling among themselves. Where there are not several classes, there cannot be several parties" — and turned it inside out: "If the nourishing soil for political parties has really disappeared, then there is no reason to forbid them." The book's claim that the absence of rival candidates proves social harmony is met by the observation that a harmony requiring the prohibition of any alternative is the proof of its own falsity. And where Chkhikvadze insists the single nominee is genuinely the people's, Trotsky named the mechanism plainly: "the Soviet people will have the right to choose their 'representatives' only from among candidates whom the central and local leaders present to them under the flag of the party."
Trotsky answers the secret ballot, too — the book's proudest procedural guarantee, its "prime guarantee of the expression of the electorate's free choice." He asks the question the book cannot: in a society said to be without exploiters, "from whom is it necessary to defend the Soviet citizens? The answer is clear: from the bureaucracy." And he quotes Stalin conceding it — the secret ballot is needed "because we intend to give the Soviet people full freedom to vote for those whom they want to elect" — with the retort that "today the 'Soviet people' cannot yet vote for those whom they want to elect." Chkhikvadze celebrates the very reform whose necessity is an admission of unfreedom. Even the book's roster of nominating bodies — the trade unions, co-operatives, youth leagues and cultural societies through which candidates are "put forward" — Trotsky had disposed of: these organisations "do not in the least represent the interests of different 'little strata', for they all have one and the same hierarchical structure," and "the last word remains with the 'party' — that is, the bureaucracy." "The constitution merely refers the elector from Pontius to Pilate." His verdict on the equality of rights the book advertises is the sentence that answers the whole volume: "the equality of the rights of workers and peasants means, in reality, an equal lack of rights before the bureaucracy." Victor Serge, whom Trotsky quotes in the same chapter, supplies the epigraph the book earns: "What remains of the October Revolution… if every worker who permits himself to make a demand, or express a critical judgment, is subject to imprisonment? Oh, after that you can establish as many secret ballots as you please!"
None of this was despair. Trotsky's conclusion was not that the soviet form was worthless — he prized it as this book does — but that it had been usurped, and that its restoration required a political revolution against the caste that had captured it. That is the standard this series treats as the measure of every Soviet account of Soviet society, and it is worth adding that the tradition Trotsky founded did not stop at critique. It gave the constructive answer the book's whole framing dares its opponents to give: that genuine workers' power requires the plurality of parties and tendencies the book forbids, not as a concession to liberalism but as the condition of soviet democracy itself. That case was set out at programmatic length in the Fourth International's resolution Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Socialist Democracy, drafted by Ernest Mandel and adopted in 1979 and, revised, in 1985 — a document that postdates this book and is offered as the tradition's considered reply, not a contemporaneous one, but whose target is precisely the doctrine that a single party expresses the unity of a classless society. Where Chkhikvadze offers the soviet form or a plurality of candidates and files the second under bourgeois deviation, that tradition demands the soviet form and the freedom of tendencies, press and organisation.
The book has one final silence, and it is the loudest, because the reality it omits was arriving weekly, in English, in the press of the tradition Trotsky founded, in the very months Chkhikvadze's manuscript was being set in type. On 5 January 1972 — a fortnight before Intercontinental Press put him on its cover — a Moscow court, in what the paper called a "hidden, virtually secret, one-day trial," sentenced Vladimir Bukovsky to "seven years confinement (two in prison, five in a strict-regime labor camp), plus five years enforced exile," the maximum penalty under Article 70 of the Russian Republic's criminal code (Intercontinental Press, vol. 10, no. 3, 24 January 1972). His crime was to have assembled and smuggled abroad the documents "showing the Kremlin misuse of psychiatric facilities to incarcerate political opponents," among them the former Red Army general Pyotr Grigorenko. The issue carried Bukovsky's own words on its cover: "People who are convinced of the injustice of an existing social system cannot have their views changed by techniques of political persecution." Through the same spring the paper tracked Grigorenko in his psychiatric prison-hospital, the confinement of the biologist Zhores Medvedev, the trials of Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin, and the samizdat Chronicle of Current Events case by case. Two bodies of print describe the same state, in the same year, and touch at not a single point. One calls the Soviets "the most democratic… system of representative institutions the world has ever known." The other reports, name by name, what that system did to citizens who exercised the "complete freedom to vote for whoever they wish" the book promises them — and what became of a man who documented the hospitals.
That Article 70, the instrument of Bukovsky's twelve years, is the same criminal legality the book praises for its "safeguarding" of "civil liberties" is not a coincidence to be exposed; it is the whole relation between the two columns. The book is not lying about the procedures. The booths are screened; the ballots are secret; the recall is real; the deputies do keep their jobs. What the procedures cannot do — what they were reshaped precisely so as not to do — is threaten the monopoly of the apparatus that stands behind the single name on every ballot. The category the book applies without limit to the capitalist West, that formal rights can mask real powerlessness, is the one thing it was built never to turn toward home. Read The Soviet Form of Popular Government, then, for exactly what it is: the calmest, most detailed official account in English of the machinery of Soviet democracy, produced at the moment — Bukovsky in the dock, the Chronicle counting the arrests — when the machinery's own admirers could most clearly have seen what it was for. The authors chose the ground and described it in full. On their own terms, and by their own definition of what democracy is, the description refutes the claim.