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.

Beginning last October, the process ot nomination commenced all over Russia at open meetings, with the nominating vote by show of hands in the presence of local Communist officials. These officials the Soviet press exhorted to "see that the right people are chosen." Moscow observers noted not only that 712 of 1,143 constituencies nominated Stalin for Parliament but most of them also went on to nominate as their candidates for parliament the Dictator's eleven most favored colleagues. From Leningrad to Vladivostok, from Samarkand to the Polar Cap this list of favorite candidates was repeated, in many cases in the following order: Premier Molotov; Heavy Industry Commissar Kaganovich; Defense Commissar Voroshilov; President Kalinin; Communist Party Central Committee Secretary Andreyev; Interior (Secret Police) Commissar Yezhov; Finance Commissar Chubar; Communist Party Central Executive Member Kosior; Leningrad Communist Leader Zhdanov; Vice Premier & Supply Commissar Mikoyan; President of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic Petrovsky; and Candidate x, locally prominent.

"Who Against Stalin?" Under the Electoral Law no candidate may run for more than one Russian parliamentary seat, and Stalin, the perennial nominee, withdrew his candidacy in all constituencies except the Stalin district of Moscow. "Who will feel like competing with Comrade Stalin [in the Stalin district]?" asked Komsomolskaya Pravda, organ of the Communist Youth, and its editor "guessed" that all the other candidates in the Stalin district "probably" would withdraw. They did. Nearly two years ago Joseph Stalin told an interviewer: "You are puzzled by the fact that only one party will come forward at the elections. You think there will be no election contests. But there will be, and I foresee very lively election campaigns!" This year, however, Candidate Stalin made no personal campaign whatever.

The example set in the Stalin district was rapidly followed all over the Soviet Union, candidates everywhere withdrawing in favor of the candidate favored by the Communist Party and the Stalin State. In all Russia last week there were only two constituencies in which there was more than one candidated he will be elected anyway!" President Kalinin recently retorted (TIME, Dec. 6): "It is a grave mistake to think this. ... If in our country in a number of places candidates withdraw their names for the benefit of some candidate, it is the result of their social kinship and common political purpose. . . . It is a sign of socialism last week. Defense Commissar Klimentiy ("Klim") Voroshilov and his Marshals and Generals of the Red Army cracked out speeches all over Russia in their hoarse, parade-ground voices, calling the election "our Mobilization!" and making vigorous efforts to get out the vote.

"In our ranks there can be no place for traitors!" bellowed Klim before an audience of 120,000 at Minsk. "We will carry on this struggle until all the enemies of the people and all the enemies of Socialism are destroyed completely! Let those who think to hamper the victorious march of many millions and masses of fighters for our new life know and remember well that THEY WILL BE DESTROYED LIKE WORMS!"

"We have enemies," admitted Premier Molotov, "among the people. However, we have learned to expose them! The Trotskyists and others are living their last days.."

As a final and more effective way of getting out the vote the state press made an astonishing last-minute somersault. Soviet editors have been telling Russians for months about how the secret ballot, "that great boon conferred by Stalin, Our Sun," will protect them. The 100,000,000 prospective voters have been warned that of course they must not write their names on these secret ballots, that any ballot would be invalidated if so signed or marked that the voter revealed his identity. Suddenly upon this point the Soviet press reversed, proclaimed last week under banner headlines that every voter was privileged to sign the ballot, thus proving his or her individual loyalty to Bolshevism and to Stalin, thus giving all citizens the privilege not only of casting a useless ballot, but of usefully registering themselves as supporters of the right people.

People's Choice. If all these things did not quite measure up to the U. S. idea of a free democratic election, they were nonetheless quite a big enough dose for Russian minds and Russian methods to cope with. Getting ballots and pencils to the places where they were needed was a big job and there were occasional slips of the new electoral machinery as when, in Simferopol, one of the polling places designated was a house torn down some months ago; in Rostov-on-Don where a polling booth was placed inside a cinema so that it was necessary to buy a ticket to the show in order to vote.

The candidates did their best at the unaccustomed game of electioneering. In Moscow, one Ivan Gudov, candidate, electioneered by announcing that two days before the election he turned out on his lathe "4,852% more work than I am supposed to do in a day!" In Leningrad, the local head of the Secret Police, Leonid Zakowsky, issued a handbill urging his election which said: "Our people are confident of their fate and their country because they now have experienced and tested their police and detective forces!" The voters also did their best, in Stalin's district they wrote slogans like HURRAH FOR COMRADE STALIN! on their ballot envelopes, and elsewhere only a few such extremists as those in Uzbekistan went so far as to murder their wives or strip them naked in order to save them from contamination in the new rite of universal suffrage.

Although Russians still have their mail tampered with, their telephones tapped, and are still likely to be waked up in the night to be carted off to jail without warrant or due process of law, it was a first step toward their education in democracy when Stalin's constitution labeled these things unconstitutional. So likewise it was education last week to 100,000,000 Russians to find that they were entitlednks, sending money abroad to Lenin & Trotsky, crisp banknotes which the go-between Litvinoff carried in his little satchel. In 1918, during the civil war with the White Russians, pugnacious Disciple Stalin, describing the difficulties of keeping his Communist troops together, wrote to the Master Lenin: "I drive and scold everyone who needs it."

Since the death of Lenin in 1924 and the expulsion of Trotsky, Stalin has driven and scolded 166,000,000 Russians to equip the Soviet Union with fairly adequate heavy industry, to collectivize Russian farms, to build an army, to fulfill successive Five Year Plans. The cost of these successes has been measured in the execution of thousands, and the exile to Siberia and the Polar North of hundreds of thousands who resisted his driving and scolding. To Stalin as to his people this week's election is a milestone. Last year when he gave them their Constitution, its terms made clear that the time had come when his driving and scolding could give place to leadership. Before the election took place he had evidently revised his theory for the time being. How capable Russia's ignorant masses are of assimilating democratic doctrine, how capable Joseph Stalin is of permitting them to do so in fact still remains to be demonstrated by the experiment of last week's election.

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