I've finally made the long, long,
long overdue continuation of this old TL!
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The 1949 Russian State Duma election was held on the 17th April 1949 to elect 750 members to the State Duma of Russia. It was the first election of the Cold War and the first in which the Russian Republic at its full territorial extent elected members, and marked the end of the only Duma to last less than the full four years. Incumbent Minister-President Nikita Khrushchev of the SR was running for re-election to a second term.
Russian and European politics was strikingly different to how it had been in 1945. In Germany, which was occupied by the Allies after the war, the Russian-controlled eastern half saw by far the harshest process of denazification that actively went after conservative parties as well as unrepentant supporters of the regime; this deepened the rift between it and the Allies, though efforts to annex the east into Russia or turn it into a satellite state were shut down, with Russia preparing to relinquish control along with the other Allies, and Russia was able to point to the leniency of British and American denazification and France’s attempted occupation of the Saarland to soften the criticism it received.
In other parts of Europe Russia’s moral status was more controversial. The attempt at a Czechoslovak
coup d’etat by Communist Klement Gottwald in 1948 cited Russia as its inspiration, and though Khrushchev denied him this support and the coup failed, suspicion of the Russian government intensified among the other Allies. He further fuelled this suspicion by supporting the democratic communist parties in France and Italy over the socialist ones, and this contributed to the decision of German Chancellor Kurt Schumacher to establish a unified German federal republic which was informally aligned with Western Europe and America.
However, by far the biggest struggle for the Khrushchev government was over Poland. Russia had seized the Eastern Borderlands of Poland in exchange for large stretches of land that were formerly part of Germany (besides Kerenskygrad, as mentioned in the 1945 entry), but irredentist and anti-Russian sentiment in Poland was growing, and in the 1947 election the Russian-friendly Socialists led by Edward Osóbka-Morawski lost to the pro-Western People’s Party of Stanisław Mikołajczyk.
This result was humiliating to Khrushchev, and this and the earlier victory of the agrarian Independent Smallholders Party in Hungary over the Social Democrats which the SR supported led many Russians to fear the country was losing prestige. While conflict in Poland was averted by Mikołajczyk, who wanted to establish the country as a stable democracy rather than indulging nationalist irredentism, it increased his international reputation further while giving the impression of Khrushchev as a warmonger.
Issues had also quickly arisen domestically regarding the National Organization and efforts to federalise Russia. Khrushchev had fiercely opposed these, and though he did not ban the party he at best did nothing to prevent, and at worst aided, raids of the party’s meetings and police brutality towards its members when they spoke, as well as threatening sedition charges. This only galvanised electoral support for the party, particularly from leftists, in the regions where it operated.
While his foreign and social policy stances were controversial, Khrushchev was very popular on the economic front for expanding the welfare state in Russia. A strong social safety net had been introduced, as well as minimum wage protections, reductions in working hours and increases in paid holiday time, universal healthcare and further investment into infrastructure. Most famously, massive new public works schemes rebuilt the devastated cities of Petrograd and Volgograd, which would form a key part of Khrushchev’s re-election campaign, with these cities immortalized on posters reading ‘Keep Russia growing!’
For their part, Cadet ran a strong campaign focusing heavily on Russia’s damaged international reputation. Former Russian Army commander Petro Grigorenko established himself as the first Cadet leader of the republican era to truly represent an alternative to the socialists and communists, drawing on his military experience and emphasizing his desire to make Russia a global power equal in influence to the US to gain credibility with the public.
Grigorenko’s popularity and the foreign policy crises of the 1945-49 period meant that for much of that time he was expected to win the next Duma election. Ironically, this would prove to work to Khrushchev’s advantage. He attacked Cadet for their antipathy to the welfare state (Grigorenko was unwilling to agree to the expansions the SR were pushing for), and during the 1948 US presidential campaign was able to snipe at both President Truman for his party’s severe division over civil rights and compare the infamously distant campaign of Thomas Dewey to Grigorenko and Cadet.
Khruschev also managed to take advantage of the continued marginalization of the Communists, which Georgy Malenkov had reformed the Bolsheviks into. He and Malenkov retained sturdy relations, but the SR was clearly the dominant partner in such relations and so could claim the support of most of the left. He also warned against a Cadet government and was able to avoid too much vote bleeding to other leftist parties.
On the new highest turnout ever recorded under the Republic, (81.8%, breaking the record set in 1933), a very close result ensued. Cadet could not overtake the SR, but did deprive it of its majority and forced it to rely on the Communists for support. Notably, almost every region that was annexed into Russia after the Second World War which did not record any votes in 1945 (the only exceptions being Kerenskygrad and southern Sakhalin, which were mostly ethnically Russian) voted for the National Organisation, demonstrating the resistance among their populations to rule from Moscow. This strong performance cemented the NO as the main organisation for independence in the coming decades.
