Having a referendum to ratify constitutional changes is a thing in a large number of countries. It’s not out of the ordinary.
Does a mechanism need to be out of the ordinary to be democratic?
The Congress of Soviets was removed with the 1936 constitution. Supreme Soviet took its place. Supreme Soviet was elected directly
Apologies, I had gotten confused since that period of soviet history saw many restructurings in the government. But this only means that all along, you knew a little about how the soviet government worked, and yet you still have many comments wasting everyone’s and your own time with nonsense and tangents.
but all ballots had only a single candidate. You can try to look up a picture of a ballot - they all have a single name on them.
I know this
The candidates in the ballots would be nominated on meetings of industrial plant and factory staff. Meetings are not elections.
Yes, that is the point. The bolsheviks explicitly abandoned liberal parliamentarianism. Despite calling other people liberals and saying that I had liberal ideas about democracy, are you now going to turn around and say that elections, the most liberal of liberal ideas about democracy are the way to go? Anyone who is not a liberal can easily recognize that electoral systems are undemocratic. Even the best of electoral “democracies” have elected representatives that are deeply unrepresentative of their constituents. I would not say that the system of meetings was the best choice exactly, but it was both the result of the democratic centralist philosophy (evolved partly as a result of the needs of the civil war) and of seeing electoral systems utterly fail both in liberalised Russia and the other parliamentary countries.
Meetings is when you sit and listen to the management read out their decisions.
Yeah … totally. All of the gains in the worker’s rights and living standards happened despite the workers having no input. By some miracle, the democratic mechanism which was just for show produced one of the most equal and highly industrialized societies of all time. By arguing that the USSR wasn’t democratic, the only thing you are arguing for is the idea that democracy is not necessary to achieve equality and standards of living. No matter how much you deride welfare as an indicator of democracy, your whole narrative doesn’t make sense. It also doesn’t make sense how the Russian working class, which had very recently launched a revolution could be disarmed so easily, or at all.
There Supreme Soviet would convene a few times per year for a week or less. All other time there would be ~40 guys from the Presidium who would take on its duties.
As opposed to doing what? Representatives cannot manage the day to day affairs of the government. No government on earth does that.
There are stenograms of sessions available in Russian… I can read Russian. What I’m reading is:
And I cannot comment on whether or not you are cherry picking or misrepresenting anything from the reports.
All of the decisions I read through have been accepted, ratified, voted on completely unanimously. No “nays”, no abstentions. This whole thing is just a glorified green stamp.
Can’t comment on this, even though I smell bs.
A lot of time is spent on speeches
This is a problem because?
None of those speeches show any dissent.
I neither trust that you have actually read and remember the contents of that many speeches, or that you understand the all of the contexts or nuances of those speeches. Furthermore, during conditions of wartime or near wartime (as your only example is in), there naturally tends to be less disagreement. You can see how quickly factions unite under external threats.
E.g. when Molotov is talking about friendly relationships with Nazi Germany and Italy in 1940, there’s zero dissent.
What is this supposed to mean? I assume you bring this particular point up specifically to play on the “USSR collaborated with nazis” trope (straining your credibility), but what does “talking about” mean exactly? For example, if he mentions that the government has stabilized the situation (stating facts), why would that generate dissent (unless he was factually incorrect)?