Cosmonauts vote from space

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32633, 15 June 1971, Page 13

Cosmonauts vote from space

(N.Z. Press association—copyright) MOSCOW, June 14. It was a politician’s dream: an election, with no opponents, more than 99 per cent of the electorate at the polling booth and even votes cast from cosmonauts in orbit.

“Today, missions of voters will express from the bottom of their hearts their full support for the party’s general Leninist line,” the Soviet Union Communist Party paper, “Pravda,” had declared.

And for the party’s candidates to the Supreme Soviets of the 15 republics and various local Soviets, defeat at the polls was impossible. Throughout the nation, thousands of balloting centres processed the votes of an estimated 150 million citizens.

Under cool, but sunny skies, Muscovites strolled to the polls through streets bedecked with Red Flags and huge banners carrying such slogans as “Long Live the

Invincible Front of Communists and Non-Party Members.”

Street-corner loudspeakers blared revolutionary songs, and “Pravda” headlined the reminder: “Everyone to the elections.”

Even from space, the three Soviet cosmonauts aboard the Salyut orbital laboratory cast their first votes—and, according to the news agency, Tass, tended a vegetable patch growing Chinese cabbages inside their craft. “We give our votes to the inviolable bloc of Communists and non-party members," the cosmonauts said in a radio message to the earth. “We vote for the wise foreign and domestic policy of our Communist Party, and for the implementation of the grandiose achievements of the new five-year economic plan." Of the vegetable garden in the sky, Tass reported; "Experiments are continuing aboard Salyut to study the influence of the conditions of weightlessness on the development of higher vegetation. “Grown for this purpose are Chinese cabbage, flax and bulb onion, cultivated by the hydroponics methods. A new nutrient solution is regularly fed to the plants, and observations are being continuously carped out."