MORE DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA?,

Waikato Times, Volume 117, Issue 19586, 27 May 1935, Page 8

MORE DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA?,

Recent dispatches from Moscow foreshadow changes in Soviet constitutional practice which, at first glance, suggest an approximation to democratic methods. Voting in Soviet elections, it is suggested, is to be secret and not, as formerly, jpy a show of hands. The peculiar inequality of Soviet electoral law which accorded 25,000 city dwellers as much representation as 125,000 peasants is to be eliminated. The system of election to the higher Soviet bodies is to be made more simple and more direct.

Judgment must bo reserved until the full details of these suggested changes aro announced and' enacted into law. It may be said, however, that not one of them strikes at the root of the causes which make the Soviet system fundamentally undemocratic and which give Stalin greater personal power, especially in the economic field, than any Tsar of recent generations enjoyod. It is noteworthy that neither Germany nor Italy, where the present rulers are avowedly contemptuous of liberalism and parliamentary democracy, enforces open voting or inequality of voting rights as between different classes of citizens. This does not prevent Mussolini and Hitler from being full-fledged dictators. The roots of the Soviet dictatorship are not in the relatively minor details which may now be subjected to modification. The decisive features of the Communist absolutism are: the complete control over every spoken and printed word; the practice of crushing immediately and summarily, by arrests and executions, any organised political opposition, even if that opposition is recruited from Communists; the maintenance of 100 per cent Communist domination of every trade union, every co-operative, every organisation of producers and consumers.

What difference will open or secret voting make, if any group that attempts to put up candidates in opposition to the official Communist slate is promptly annihilated as “counter-revolutionary”? What benefit will the peasants gain from theoretical permission to choose more delegates to the Soviets, if these delegates are carefully hand-picked by the local Communist Party groups? The changes which are predicted in Russia are surface changes, which do not alter the fundamental character of the Soviet regime. The Soviet Union will not become democratic, in any commonly understandable sense of that term, by reshuffling of its electoral practices, any more than it assured its citizens freedom from arbitrary arrest and execution by giving the secret police a new name last summer.