Two elections in one go this time! (Mostly because I didn't have much to say about 1929 and didn't want to wait to do 1933.)
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The 1929 Russian State Duma election was held on the 14th April 1929 to elect 671 seats to the Russian Republic’s legislature. The Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) was running for re-election to a fourth term in government, and at this point was the only party in the Republic’s history to govern the country.
The election came after the SR had been wracked with considerable infighting during 1928. The NEP had begun to see diminishing returns, and Kerensky was growing unpopular with the public for industrialisation remaining slow. The figure who came through the ranks to challenge Kerensky for the leadership was Nikolai Konrdatiev, his Minister of Finance (the most senior economics position in the executive), who used his economics experience, which became known as economic cycle theory. This was a sort of proto-Keynesian theory of economic growth, but differed from it in that it did not really advocate for demand-side economics to counterbalance economic stagflation and that it suggested the cycles were fixed at around fifty years.
Like social credit theory, economic cycle theory is generally regarded as inaccurate by modern economists, but Kondratiev was a much-respected economist and intellectual, only 37 and, most importantly for voters and SR members, looked like he had a proper plan for industrialisation. Consequently, when the choice was between him and the flailing Kerensky, he won the leadership and became Minister-President easily, and by the time the election came in 1929 it looked like there was some degree of progress being made on his plans.
The 1929 election saw the four parties taking up most of the Duma’s seats in the 1921 and 1925 elections finally decay to three, as the Ukrainian Socialist Bloc finally faded away for good. Meanwhile, despite the bulk of the Bloc’s support going to the SR, the government actually lost seats as Cadet and the Bolsheviks combined to take over 300 seats for the first time ever, as Cadet benefitted from Vasily Maklakov promising a more rapid industrialisation than Kondratiev would commit to and Bukharin’s Bolsheviks pledging a more egalitarian form of the NEP. Even so, the disappearance of the Bloc naturally meant all three parties increased their voteshares.
Kondratiev’s position was secure for the time being, but it was clear to everyone that this was conditional on the SR implementing a successful industrialisation. Due to factors in world politics mostly beyond his control, this would be a task at which the SR were to fail miserably.
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The 1933 Russian State Duma election was held on the 16th April 1933, to elect 671 members to the Duma, the legislature of the Russian Republic. The Socialist Revolutionary (SR) government of Nikolai Kondratiev was running for re-election, having controlled the Russian legislature since the Revolution in 1917.
By this point, Kondratiev and the SR had become deeply unpopular. Within six months of the last election, the Wall Street Crash had severely damaged the world economy, and Konratiev declared in an address to the nation regarding the economic crisis in early 1930 that the crash proved his theory of economic cycles, urging them to have faith that he was the only one who could solve the crisis.
The Bolshevik leader Bukharin denounced it as ‘condescending elitist nonsense’ in the Duma, his party seizing upon leftist distrust of the SR and working to produce its own economic development plan that would incorporate infrastructure spending in contrast to the SR’s plan. Kondratiev did himself no favours by allowing the seizure of agricultural produce to help pay for industrialisation, which many rural labourers saw as a betrayal as poor areas started to suffer from famines.
Despite the Bolsheviks managing to accumulate interest among the left that had traditionally supported the SR, many moderate and conservative Russians distrusted the party, and Cadet capitalized upon this. The fairly conciliatory Vasily Maklakov stood down in 1930 in favour of the elder statesman Petr Levanidov. A former member of the Imperial Duma who had sat for Arkhangelsk (an impressive feat given its typical SR lean at the time) in every State Duma since 1921, Levanidov proposed a vaguer and more moderate plan for industrial development, as well as stressing his peasant background and advocating for the abolition of produce seizure.
With both leftists and peasants abandoning it, the SR was left with little chance of securing another plurality, let alone a majority, in the Duma. Cadet’s campaign stressed its perceived authoritarianism while the Bolsheviks took to nicknaming it the ‘Capitalist Reactionary Party’ to emphasize the betrayal of its principles they perceived it as having committed. Kondratiev took to having armed guards protect him during the election period for fear of assassination.
Perhaps the most striking part of the 1933 election, however, was that it saw the emergence of the far-right in Russia on a parliamentary level for the first time since the Revolution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was closely connected to a former Imperial party; from 1905 to 1917, the Union of the Russian People (URP) had been an ardently monarchist and nationalist group, with paramilitary anti-revolutionaries known as the Black Hundreds who had suppressed supporters of the 1905 revolution. In 1932, Nikolai Markov, who had been a leader of the URP in the Imperial period and had been underground since the 1917 Revolution, announced the re-foundation of the party to ‘unite the Republic’ (words many people felt to be hypocritical despite his historic Tsarism).
Since by this time the Fascists controlled Italy and the Nazis were well on their way to taking full control of Germany, many more bigoted Russians believed that fascism was the future, expressing fondness for closer ties with them due to the breakdown of relations with Britain and France in the 1920s (though Konratiev had worked hard to mend relations with the former once Ramsay MacDonald became PM in 1929, and relatively cordial relations between the two would continue until after the end of the Second World War).
The URP’s agenda was similar to the Italian Fascists and Nazis in terms of its imperialism, authoritarianism, irredentism, racism and anti-Semitism, but the crucial hindrance it faced was its arch-monarchist past. Anti-fascist Russians, particularly the Bolsheviks, denounced and even attacked URP members for being ‘traitors’ to the Republic and the Revolution, and all the major parties rejected the prospect of cooperating with the party in the Duma.
The 1933 election saw both one of the highest turnouts for a Russian election (81.4% of voters participated, an increase of over 13% from the 1929 election) and one of the most inconclusive and evenly-matched Dumas ever elected. Despite this, it was clear that the real losers were the SR, which suffered one of its worst results ever. The party not only lost its majority, but also its plurality, lost nearly 20% of the vote and almost half its seats, and even failed to come first in Konratiev’s home district of Kostroma. Cadet came first, winning the most seats in a Duma election for the first time since 1906 despite only a fairly small increase in its voteshare, and the Bolsheviks also enjoyed their best result ever at the time, coming a close third.
To put the public at ease, Levanidov declared he would seek to form a government with the support of the SR and Bolsheviks on ‘matters of consensus’ (in other words, to avoid his government falling on a vote of confidence), and after negotiations with Kondratiev and Bukharin the two agreed to vote to make him Minister-President to see off any attempt at a coup by the URP. Despite this coordination, URP members, with the full support of Markov, attempted to intervene in the vote by causing a paramilitary riot in Moscow, even breaking into the Moscow home of Leon Trotsky (who had been under house arrest since 1918) and murdering him. The attack was a huge shock to the Russian public, even among anti-socialists, and emboldened the movement to ban the URP; even before this ban was passed in 1934, several URP members were arrested and never sat in the Duma.
While the URP had been severely delegitimized by this fiasco, and the Duma duly voted to make Levanidov Minister-President, it was clear the Cadet government was under enormous pressure both from the parliamentary arithmetic and from the public at large. It is probably not surprising to learn that Levanidov would ultimately be the shortest-serving Minister-President of Russia.