Elections were not traditionally an important form of linkage between regime and public in the USSR, or indeed in its Tsarist predecessor. Representative institutions of any kind were slow to develop in prerevolutionary Russia: the first elected assembly, the State Duma, came into existence as late as 1906, and although it had begun to develop some independent authority by the First World War it operated upon an extremely limited franchise and appears to have engaged little public interest or support by the time of its dissolution. Political parties became legal at the same time, but they operated under severe restrictions and there was little public awareness of the distinctive positions they had assumed – or even of their existence. The short period of Provisional Government from February to October 1917 saw the emergence of legal political contestation, with up to fifty parties competing in relatively free elections both to local authorities and to the Constituent Assembly. The Bolshevik revolution of November 1917, however, although ostensibly intended to transfer ‘All power to the Soviets’, soon led to the formation of a single-party dictatorship within which political power became increasingly centralised and elections an increasingly empty formality.

The adoption of a new constitution in December 1936 appeared at first to hold out the prospect of significant change.