ELECTIONS IN RUSSIA

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28532, 11 March 1958, Page 13

ELECTIONS IN RUSSIA

Impressions Of U.S. Observers

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) NEW YORK, March 10.

Three American observers out to feel the pre-election pulse of the Soviet Union one week before nation-wide elections for the Supreme Soviet, the country’s bicameral legislature, had found little to remind them of their own country’s elections, according to a “New York Times” correspondent in Kiev. The correspondent, Max Frankel, said in a dispatch from Kiev today that no billboards cluttered the horizon and no loudspeakers drowned out the sparrows as another spring approached in the Ukraine. No handouts cluttered the footpaths. There was no election turmoil because the Communist Party, which had controlled the Soviet Union for 40 years, remained in charge. Its own nominees and the nonparty candidates it had endorsed would be the only ones on next Sunday’s ballots, one candidate for each of the Supreme Soviet’s 1364 seats.

They would be the only ones elected by an expected 99.99 per cent, of the eligible voters.

Mr Frankel said the United States observers had seen in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev that the election for all iis calmness, was serious business for the men in charge. “It is an election not to air competing philosophies or remedies, or to place blame for shortcomings,” he said. “It is designed to promise, entice and cajole the electorate, to smother the country with pride and demonstrations of unity, to give sanction and legitimacy to its rulers and to give the Soviet people the feeling that their interests and votes count.”

The United States delegation is returning the visit of a Soviet delegation which visited the United States during the 1956 Presidential campaign. Its members are Professor Richard Scamon, chief of the Political Section of the Governmental Affairs Institute, Dr. Cyril Black, Professor of History at Princeton University, and Mr Hedley Denovan, managing editor of the magazine “Fortune.”

China’s Output Of Tea

HONG KONG, March 10. China plans to become the world’s biggest tea producer by 1962, the New China News Agency reports. This target has been set by the Ministry of Agriculture. India is now first, Ceylon second and China third in the output of tea internationally.