Abstract
According to often-quoted statements, Soviet elections were hardly worth mentioning before the »archival revolution« of the 1990s. They were »elections without choice«, non-competitive elections with only one candidate per constituency and almost 100 per cent of approval. Accordingly, the elections were held to demonstrate power via the stabilizing effect mass mobilization of the party public had on the system. This analysis is an attempt to show that such elections also had different meanings and that forms of dissent were possible. Its epistemological interest is in spheres of societies of the Soviet type in which nonconformity and resistance were articulated. Such behaviour was the flipside of the real purpose of elections in socialist states: the regime's self-assurance of the population's loyalty. Comments on voting slips, up until now an unknown archival source, are used to analyse both variants of socialist elections.
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