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"The result is 100 per cent—100 per cent!" exulted Pravda. "What election in what country for what candidate has given a 100-per cent response?" Soviet officials explained that in Russia, under Stalin's new "Most Democratic Constitution in the World," the urge to vote is so strong that at thousands of polling places crowds of voters waited through much of the previous night for the polls to open. These earliest comers were reported in most cases to be elderly men and women. Vigorous young Russians, confident of being able to shove through the crowds, mostly arrived "late"—that is not until early morning. Many an old woman was reported to have exclaimed after casting her ballot, "I had a terrible headache before—but now it is gone. I feel so much better since I have been able to vote for Stalin!"
No speech against any candidate was reported made anywhere in the Soviet Union. However, the official Soviet press said last week that at Leningrad a citizen named Golubev was given seven years for "swearing at candidates." He only swore and so was let off easily. An opposition speech would have been "Trotskyism" or "wrecking," for which the legal penalty is death.
Of the 1,143 Deputies elected to Russia's new parliament, the Supreme Soviet, official figures listed 855 as enrolled members of the Communist Party, 184 as women. All 1,143 are Stalinist Deputies, but the fact that 288 are not enrolled Communists was heavily emphasized by the official Russian press last week, hailed as "The Victory of the Bloc of Party and Non-Party Bolsheviki!"
Several days afterward, when the world press had ceased front-paging the Soviet election, Moscow officials unobtrusively announced that 1,334,124 votes were "scratched"— that is, the name of the Stalinist candidate was struck out by voters. The further official admission was made that "more than 2,000,000 votes were also invalidated in other ways."
Since each ballot was printed with two names (the name of a candidate for the lower house and the name of a candidate for the upper house of the Supreme Soviet), the Government newsorgan Izvestia claimed that two scratched votes equaled only one scratched ballot—that is, one voter who balked at voting for the candidates put up by Mr. Stalin's friends.
If one makes the rather likely assumption that the votes "invalidated in other ways" were spoiled by other recusant voters and divides the total by two, the result is 1,667,000 Russians who still have the courage to oppose Mr. Stalin. Among more than 90,000,000 voters this is a small number. Also small is the number of Mr. Stalin's chief supporters, the 2,000,000 (estimated) enrolled members of the Communist Party.