Elections Matter

This election matters; in fact, they all do.

“Elections mean a popular vote, not this charade,” said Ivan Zhdakayev, a deputy from Sakhalin Island in the Soviet Far East who criticized the contested results of Russia’s first Presidential election in 1990. An election that took place only a year after its first legislative election in seventy years, the same year a crumbling communist-led Soviet union surrendered the Berlin wall amid a wave of revolutions that left the former American foe on the brink of collapse.

By normal standards, the 1990 election was far removed from a democratic process. Of the 2,250 lawmakers, 750 were directly elected by the Communist Party and its satellite “public organizations” such as the Young Communist League and the Soviet Women’s Committee. Another 399 seats were filled in single-candidate elections, and the remaining 1,101 districts came with a worker collective caveat that directly assisted loyal to the party candidates.

Yet, a growing pro-democracy movement choreographed by the district assembly allowed for a two-candidate runoff between a party sanctioned candidate, Yevgeny Brakov, and an independent-minded maverick, Boris Yeltsin. Shockingly, Yeltsin overwhelmingly defeated Barkov with 89.2 percent of the vote.

“I think this has given perestroika a certain urgency,” Yeltsin said in reference to the…