Disenfranchized Persons

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DISENFRANCHIZED PERSONS

Soviet Russia's first Constitution of 1918 decreed that the bourgeois classes should be disenfranchised. The categories of people marked for disenfranchisement included those who hire labor for the purpose of profit; those who live off unearned income such as interest money or income from property; private traders and middlemen; monks and other clerics of all faiths and denominations; agents of the former tsarist police, gendarmes, prison organs, and security forces; former noblemen; White Army officers; leaders of counterrevolutionary bands; the mentally ill or insane; and persons sentenced by a court for crimes of profit or depravity. However, many more people were vulnerable to the loss of rights. Vladimir Lenin declared that his party would "disenfranchise all citizens who hinder socialist revolution." In addition, family members of disenfranchised persons shared the fate of their relatives "in those cases where they are materially dependent on the disenfranchised persons."

Also described as lishentsy, the disenfranchised were not only denied the ability to vote and to be elected to the local governing bodies or soviets: Under Josef Stalin the disenfranchised lost myriad rights and became effective outcasts of the Soviet state. They lost the right to work in state institutions or factories or to serve in the Red Army. They could not obtain a ration card or passport. The disenfranchised could not join a trade union or adopt a child, and they were denied all forms of public assistance, such as a state pension, aid, social insurance, medical care, and housing. Many lishentsy were deported to forced labor camps in the far north and Siberia.

In 1926, the government formalized a procedure that made it possible for some of the disenfranchised to be reinstated their rights. Officially, disenfranchised persons could have their rights restored if they engaged in socially useful labor and demonstrated loyalty to Soviet power. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded Soviet institutions with various appeals for rehabilitation, and some managed to reenter the society that excluded them.

According to statistics maintained by the local soviets, over 2 million people lost their rights, but these figures on the number of people disenfranchised are probably underestimated. In the electoral campaigns of 1926 to 1927 and 1928 to 1929, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) reported roughly 3 to 4 percent of rural and 7 to 8 percent of the urban residents disenfranchised as a percentage of the voting-age population. Rates of disenfranchisement were higher in those areas with large non-Russian populations. Although portrayed as bourgeois elements, the disenfranchised actually included a wide variety of people, such as gamblers, tax evaders, embezzlers, and ethnic minorities. The poor, the weak, and the elderly were especially vulnerable to disenfranchisement.

Disenfranchisement ended with Stalin's 1936 Constitution, which extended voting rights to all of the former categories of disenfranchised people except for the mentally ill and those sentenced by a court to deprivation of rights. Nonetheless, "former people," or those with ties to the old regime, remained vulnerable during subsequent campaigns of Stalinist terror.

See also: bolshevism; constitution of 1918; constitution of 1936; lenin, vladimir ilich