The 1937 Russian State Duma election was held on the 18th April 1937, to elect 671 members to the State Duma. It is notable for being the last Russian election held before World War II and while Russia still had its pre-1945 boundaries, as well as seeing the only time a party other than the SR or Cadet has become the biggest party in the Duma.
The 1933 election had seen a close three-way result in the Duma, with Cadet winning the most seats and forming a minority government, with Petr Levanidov serving as Minister-President with conditional support from the SR and Bolsheviks on some issues (his party commanded only 202 seats immediately after the election, 134 short of an overall majority). However, the Levanidov ministry was collapsing by early 1934. Levanidov was approaching his 70th birthday and other than ending grain seizure had hardly any political accomplishments to his name. After a fateful vote that February, in which forty Cadet members voted against banning the URP (the SR and Bolsheviks voted in favour to a man), a vote of no confidence in the Cadet ministry was forced and passed by the Opposition parties on the 15th February 1934 (the URP members who had not resigned from the Duma after their party’s ban split fairly evenly for and against this vote, interestingly).
The consensus was that Levanidov’s most likely successor would be the new SR leader, Isaac Steinberg, but given a viciously anti-Semitic party had just been banned and Steinberg was both Jewish and quite vocally left-wing, he refused to put himself forward for the vote; Vladimir Zenzinov, on the right of the party, put himself forward as Minister-President candidate in his stead. Seeking to succeed Levanidov for Cadet was Aleksandr Konovalov. However, both of these figures were notably unpopular with their party and the public respectively, and seeing an opportunity, Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin started a campaign for his own ascension to the office.
While in earlier years, this would have been improbable if not impossible, it was suddenly a possibility for Bukharin both due to his clear commitment to Russian democracy shown by the drastic reform he had seen the Bolsheviks through over the 15 years he had led the party, and due to the deep frustration with what had become known as the ‘industrial question’ and how the other two parties had handled it. Bukharin made it clear he would allow the private enterprise of the NEP to stand, but would also pursue public works programmes to help the impoverished of Russia and pursue further industrialisation.
Public pressure and protests in support of Bukharin mounted, and when the vote was finally held Bukharin secured a broad coalition of support from the entire Bolshevik Party, left-wing SRs wanting a more vigorous socialist government, and Cadet members afraid of Zenzinov winning power who believed Bukharin would fall as quickly as Levanidov.
Bukharin became Minister-President on the 5th March, and with the support of most of the SRs he set about instigating sweeping reforms. These can be summed up in two major elements, economic and in terms of foreign relations. The economic element was embodied in what he called the New Industrial Policy (NIP), which started programmes that employed workers to first build and then work in nationalized factories, or privately-owned farms with independent trade union protections.
His work in the field of foreign relations was defined by patriotism and aggressive anti-fascism. Under Bukharin, Russia aggressively protested the ineffectual response of the League of Nations to Nazi and Japanese imperialism, and with the support of Steinberg and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Ivan Maisky it drastically reversed course with Nazi Germany, introducing sanctions and even going as far as to instigate anti-German propaganda campaigns (which, more positively, came in conjunction with harsh penalties against anti-Semitism). While other nations at the time favoured peace with Hitler, Bukharin started rearmament, knowing Nazi aggression would almost certainly be pointed at Russia before long.
Bukharin’s critics were vocal and attacked him from multiple angles- some, particularly Konovalov, denounced what they saw as the suppression of personal freedoms, while others pointed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories at the Bolsheviks and SR. Even so, most voters thought favourably of Bukharin, considering him and his party to be patriots and Steinberg’s SR as having returned to its place as champions of the peasants. The Bolsheviks and SR ran a fairly united campaign, with the clear implication being a continued alliance- as a poster campaign depicting the three main party leaders put it, Russia had ‘a party of the workers (the Bolsheviks), a party of the peasants (the SR) and a party of the bourgeoisie (Cadet)’.
The 1937 Duma was easily the biggest success for the Russian left in the Republic’s history. Almost three-quarters of the vote and 577 seats went to the Bolsheviks and SR combined, and the Bolsheviks came just 18 seats away from having an overall majority on their own. Meanwhile, Cadet saw their worst result since the 1917 rout by a considerable margin. Konovalov would assert for the rest of his life that voter suppression was a key factor in just how poorly the party did, and while there is evidence for this in some areas, much of the voter suppression was towards far-right voters rather than the centrist and centre-right core that made up Cadet’s voter base at the time.
Ultimately the 1937 Duma would turn out to be the longest-serving in the Republic’s history, as by the time its mandate was scheduled to run out, the country would be deep into a war with the Axis Powers.