Unexciting and without pictures this time (work is very busy this week), but I felt like I should at least do something:
ELECTION OF 1944
Russia has a population of about 115 million people in 1944. Slightly less than half of these people live in the rural countryside while the remainder is split evenly between large cities/administrative centers and smaller urban areas.
The country is also split geographically and culturally into different areas. Northern Russia is characterized by a mix of older towns where the upper classes and the nobility are strong, some newer industrial towns like Archangelsk and Murmansk, and a poor rural population that has to deal with the harsh winter. Central Russia has many medium sized cities that blend together business and industry and where a thriving middle class is beginning to emerge. Outside the cities the countryside is dotted with medium sized towns built around factories, power plants, and other modern industrial structures. Southern Russia has much fewer large cities and they are not as industrial as those of Central Russia. The economy is focused mostly on the vast farms and fields in the countryside, the trade along the Volga, and Don rivers, and the oil and mineral extraction further south. Russia’s Ukrainian possessions are a peculiar case of contrasts with some large industrial cities that are scattered across a vast rural and agricultural landscape. In Ural and Siberia large industrial cities dominated by Russians clash with small settlements of the native people and of Russians who support the larger cities by operating farms, lumber mills, mines, and other extractive industries. Further away from the cities there are small homesteads and villages where people survive on sustenance farming and barter trade. In the Far East a few large industrial and business towns of Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Okhotsk, Magadan, are mixed with fishing villages and small towns that harvest the resources of the land. Trade with China and Japan is important here and the entire region lives off of the Pacific Ocean.
LEGISLATIVE ELECTION
The Duma elections more than the Presidential one were a referendum on the policies of the Conservative administration of the last four years, and the country soundly rejected these policies. Social Revolutionaries made inroads in traditionally conservative areas in rural Central and Southern Russia. The only region where Conservatives performed better than four years ago was the Far East where the war with Japan proved popular. The Mensheviks lost ground across the board, retaining control only in very urban and industrial areas in the Ural and Siberia as their platform of class warfare seems outdated and irrelevant in the reality of a prosperous Russian economy. The only solace to the Conservatives is the success of their coalition partner – the Octobrists – who continue to remain very popular in the north west of the country, but can’t seem to secure a foothold outside of that area.
And here are the final tallies (with results of 1941 election for comparison):
Nationalists: 13 (15)
Conservatives: 106 (165)
Octobrists: 33 (26)
Kadets: 40 (35)
SRs: 212 (169)
Mensheviks: 14 (20)
Federalists: 32 (20)
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
The election was a re-match between Romanov, Maklakov, Chernov, and Bukharin. Bukharin fared even worse than his legislative counterparts, squeezed out of his former rural votes by the SRs and Conservatives and popular now only with older industrial workers in Siberia. Maklakov was never a competitive candidate, but his significant result shows that neither Chernov nor Romanov are really popular with the middle class. Fortunately for them the middle class is not very large in Russia, but it is growing.
So in the end it came down to votes in large cities and rural areas. Chernov dominated the voting in large cities, winning by a margin of 8:1 in Moscow, for example. The only major city to give more votes to Romanov than Chernov was St. Petersburg because of the continued popularity of Romanov and the Octobrists there. But unlike the last election Chernov made significant inroads into Romanov’s conservative base in the rural areas, the two polled almost evenly in Southern Russia, previously a Romanov stronghold. And with the popularity of the Mensheviks receding Chernov could count on more support amongst ex-Mensheviks as well.
Here are the final tallies (with results of 1941 election for comparison):
Romanov: 23.4 million (26.3 million)
Maklakov: 6 million (4 million)
Chernov: 32.8 million (22.3 million)
Bukharin: 2.1 million (2.3 million)
Chernov secured a convincing victory, returning for a second term as President after sitting out for 4 years. Romanov and other Conservatives accepted the dismal result, unsure of what they could have done differently given the incredible military success they led the country to.
.
