RUSSIA: Foreign News, Dec. 20, 1937

Russia, in the 21st year since her great Revolution, last week celebrated her coming of age. Her celebration was to let her people exercise the right of universal suffrage. For years Russian workers have voted locallyvotes of 25,000 townspeople counted as much as the votes of 125,000 country people, thereby keeping the conservative peasantry under control. But last week Russia, having come of age, allowed her people all the fun and trappings of a real national election.

Not only workers and peasants, but all Russians including priests, bourgeois and ex-aristocratssal suffrage; to vote man for man as equals; to elect not merely little men to vote for bigger men, but to choose directly their own representatives to the new Russian 1,143-member parliament, the Verkovnyi Soviet or Supreme Council; to vote not in public by a show of hands, but in private in a red-curtained booth, by secret ballot according to their own convictions.

"Depend on Stalin!" Russia's Dictator, famed for his heavy, sardonic humor, was in his best form last week as constituents of the Stalin district of Moscow jampacked a large theatre. They looked for Candidate Stalin. He was not on the platform, packed with lesser Bolsheviks. He was hidden in the depths of one of the boxes. Finally he left his box, suddenly appeared on the stage. The house went wild.

"I had no intention of speaking. I have been dragged here by force," Candidate Stalin was pleased ponderously to jest. "But so long as I am here I may as well say somethinging already has been said by others! . . . Elections in other countries are conducted as clashes of class against class. There is pressure by the sharks of Capitalism! We have no pressure here by the haves or have nots. . . . None can put pressure on the people to manipulate the elections. That is why our elections are the only free democratic elections in the world. . . . Comrades, on my side I assure you you can depend on Comrade Stalin to carry out his duty to workers, peasants and the intelligentsia!"

The Right People, The bright and shining coming-of-age gift of universal suffrage and free democratic elections promised Russia by Comrade Stalin's Constitution (TiME, June 15, 1936, et seq.), being something new in Russia, naturally did not take quite the form which it has in Capitalist nations.