Elections to Rural Soviets of Kuban-Black Sea Region, 1920–1923: Practice of Electoral Campaigns

This article examines the elections to the rural Soviets of the Kuban-Black Sea Region during the period of 1920–1923, a time when the Bolsheviks’ political and economic activities combined the methods of War Communism and the New Economic Policy. The study investigates the impact of the estate-based characteristics of the population and traditional forms of local self-government on the electoral outcomes in the rural Soviets of Kuban. The research is grounded in archival materials from the funds of the Krasnodar Krai. The authors argue that the transition to new forms of local self-government — namely, the Soviets — unfolded amidst a pronounced confrontation between the rural population and the Bolshevik authorities. The analysis demonstrates that in the early 1920s, as the Soviets were increasingly “Bolshevized,” the conflict between the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the rural populace intensified. This was due to Bolshevik deputies and local party activists intervening more aggressively in various spheres of peasant and Cossack economic life. The authors conclude that for the Bolsheviks, the Soviets functioned as an apparatus through which the ruling party implemented its initiatives. The study reveals that this period was characterized by an intensive process of statebuilding and the consolidation of Soviets into a unified network. It is established that a new form of “popular parliamentarism” was implemented within the Soviets, which subsequently transformed into a system of representation for the party-bureaucratic nomenklatura. The authors contend that the electoral legislation was inherently discriminatory, and that by exploiting specific features of electoral law, the Bolsheviks sought to systematically exclude their political opponents from power.

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