This short contribution aims to demonstrate the usefulness of the graphosphere concept for one specific area of imperial Russian administrative practice: voting. Elections were an integral part of the Muscovite state from at least the middle of the sixteenth century, when local assemblies were required to choose representatives who would be responsible for the delivery of taxes and the discharging of police and judicial functions. The voting procedure was not prescribed, but it acquired an administrative (and graphospheric) superstructure. Elections were primarily a way for the government to impose on communities certain obligations, and it was crucial that members of the community assume these obligations in writing. Voters were required to sign the election document; they were guarantors rather than citizens providing a mandate to their representatives. Pre-modern Russia was far from any notion of democratic inclusion or representativeness: the signatories might be a small minority of local residents, but they needed to be wealthy and influential (fit, in other words, to serve as guarantors).Footnote ¹ In this collectively produced document it seems plausible to suggest we find an early Russian electoral graphosphere: it might have had a tiny audience by modern standards, but it would presumably have gained much of its force from its visibility to the co-signatories and to various office-holders in the Muscovite state.

The electoral principle was taken to a broader scale in the proceedings of the various iterations of the zemskii sobor (Council of the Land) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This consultative body was summoned only irregularly, and its voting procedures remain obscure. But it was at least a partly elected institution with a significant quantity of documentation generated by officials from the chancelleries. The electoral paper trail began long before the delegates assembled: the voevody (military governors) were responsible for issuing prizyvnye gramoty (written summons) and securing (often in the face of passive resistance) the requisite number of vybornye (elected delegates).Footnote ²

Although the zemskii sobor did not survive the seventeenth century, voting qua collective responsibility lived on long into the modern era. In a detailed study of the eighteenth-century posadskaia obshchina (town community), Aleksandr Kizevetter described how election meetings were designed to generate a prigovor (judgment) signed by a suitably wealthy and high-status set of local men. From the examples Kizevetter provides, we gain a strong sense that the prigovor could be a public, visible, and at times acutely contested piece of writing: in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for competing groups in the posad assembly to discuss separately and produce rival prigovory, if necessary using intimidation and even physical violence to secure additional signatures.Footnote ³ The same underlying logic—usually without the rough and tumble—continued to guide the election of officials much later than the eighteenth century in peasant communities or in the “native administration” in various colonial settings. In a Kazakh village at the end of the nineteenth century, the signatories of the prigovor were typically required to confirm that the persons elected were “of good conduct,” “not under prosecution or investigation,” and “deserve the trust placed in them.” Local tsarist officials would then make their own judgment as to the trustworthiness of the successful candidates (and of the fellow villagers who regularly wrote in to accuse them of bribery and malpractice).Footnote ⁴

But, even if it did not abandon the notion of elections as collective obligation, the post-Petrine state took much closer interest in the procedure of voting as opposed to its literal bottom line (the set of signatures appended to an election document). In the late 1710s, Peter brought to Russia the practice of ballotirovka (the ballot): each candidate was to be voted on in turn, with voters casting balls on one or other side of a partitioned box to indicate a vote for or against. For Peter, voting was primarily a means of ensuring dispassionate decision-making in government and counteracting nepotism in army appointments.Footnote ⁵ His immediate successors reversed or watered down these measures. But ballotirovka became thoroughly institutionalized under Catherine II, first through the pan-imperial elections of delegates to the Legislative Commission in 1767 and then, following the provincial and urban reforms of 1775 and 1785, through elections to permanent institutions of local administration.Footnote ⁶

Under the terms of ballotirovka (prescribed in imperial decrees), the act of voting was performative rather than scribal: it required the casting of a ball in the presence of peers rather than the completion of a written ballot. Nonetheless, voting in the noble and town assemblies of imperial Russia from Catherine onwards had a capacious graphosphere. Elections took place as much on paper as in person: they required voter lists; invitations to voters to attend; public announcements of elections (to be displayed in public places or printed in local newspapers where these were available); certificates authorizing proxy votes; documentation demonstrating voter credentials (property or membership in the local genealogical register); oaths by participants who affirmed in writing their promise to vote “according to conscience and honor, and without partiality or motives of personal profit”;Footnote ⁷ ballotirovochnye listy (ballot sheets) with the official record of vote tallies (to be signed by all participants); and formal requests for permission not to attend the election or not to take up elected office (Figure 1; Figure 2). For one category of participant—noble women—elections existed solely in the graphosphere. In advance of the elections to the Legislative Commission in 1767, they were invited to send in their views in writing, even if they were “relieved” of the obligation to attend in person.Footnote ⁸ Later on, in the noble elections that became routine after 1775, those noble women who met the property qualification could assign their vote to a male relative; such proxy voting was abolished in 1810 but restored (with more restrictive property qualifications) in 1831.Footnote ⁹

Figure 1.

A ballot sheet for an election to the board of guardians of the Kishinev zemstvo girls’ high school, 1900. Courtesy of Agenția Națională a Arhivelor, Chișinău.

Figure 1 Long description

Title/Date: ′Благополучной листок 96 для избрания в ХХІІІ очередные бессрочные Поуправляющих Баллотных Собраний Песков в Попечительский Совет Кишиневской Земской Женской Гимназии. 15 декабря 1900 г.′ Purpose: Election to the board of guardians of the Kishinev zemstvo girls’ high school. Results: Candidate list with vote counts - 1. Ф.Ф. Н. Чурилович 40, 2. Ф.Ф. В.Н. Чурилович 30, 3. Г.Н. Чурилович 28, 4. Ф.Ф. Н. Губерман 3, 5. Ф.Ф. В. С. Шнейдер 1. Signatures: Multiple handwritten signatures in cursive at the bottom, some names are hard to read. Visual Characteristics: The document is a ruled form with a table for vote counts, handwritten cursive entries and a large section of signatures at the bottom. Layout: Title at top, table in the middle with candidate names and vote columns, signatures below. Tone: Formal administrative record.

Figure 2.

An oath signed by voters in an election in the Jewish society of Soroca, 1914. There are several further pages of signatures. Courtesy of Agenția Națională a Arhivelor, Chișinău.

The graphosphere gained further ramifications after voting day: elections routinely gave rise to complaints and protests, often pertaining to departures from the approved documentary procedure, which generated further reams of writing and official documentation. Failures to follow the stipulated procedures were common, especially in the early days of the system in the late eighteenth century. A degree of flexibility was shown in extending noble elections to newly acquired territories. Early in the reign of Alexander I, for example, Polish nobles standing for election were given a temporary exemption from the requirement for service rank, and in practice even thirty years later exceptions were being made.Footnote ¹⁰ Periodic attempts were made to amend or tighten election regulations across the empire, notably in a decree of December 1831 that significantly reduced the pool of nobles eligible for election and imposed onerous new administrative requirements.Footnote ¹¹

Over time, procedures became more uniform. But, for all the tweaking, Catherine’s Russian imperial model of elections, with all its associated documentation, remained in place all the way to 1861—and in many respects to February 1917. In the State Duma elections of 1906, Russia’s first experience of mass (though not universal, direct or equal) suffrage, the provincial electoral assemblies that produced the lion’s share of the deputies still conducted their business by ballotirovka. More to the point, much of the paperwork generated by the ballot would have been entirely recognizable to participants and election officials from fifty or even one hundred years earlier. There were still ballotirovochnye listy and (for first-stage peasant elections) prigovory; there were still petitions from voters attempting to prove their tax or property qualifications; the drawing up of voter lists remained both labor-intensive and consequential. The difference was that the electoral graphosphere had now expanded: these voter lists were now more public, made visible above all by newspapers that had increased enormously in number and circulation since the time of Alexander II, let alone that of Nicholas I or Catherine. Largely thanks to this publicity, the lists were also more subject to contestation, especially in the politically charged major cities. In one Gogolian episode in Vilʹna (present-day Vilnius) early in 1907, a voter named Tipograf (“Printer”) discovered that his name had been wrongly entered on the voter list for the election to the Second Duma as “Tirograf.” Despite making a timely complaint in writing, he was turned away at the election venue by an official who cited the authority of the published list. It turned out that another member of the electoral commission was director of the company where Tipograf worked and so could vouch for him; his vote was eventually accepted. But Tipograf still sent in a complaint about what he and many others at the time saw as the instrumentalization of the graphosphere: “we clearly see from this how the chairman of the Commission abused voters … He found quibbles with every voter, especially Jews, and in this way, it seems, made likely that many Jews who could not explain themselves well in Russian preferred not to attend the election, so as not to subject themselves to torture by the chairman of the Commission.”Footnote ¹²

If we take a longer view of the imperial period, how well did the electoral graphosphere perform its allotted functions? To use the terms proposed by Simon Franklin, to what extent did it enable the “exercise of power” and the “projection of authority” or provide “mechanisms of control”?Footnote ¹³ How effectively, over the two centuries before 1917, did it assist the Russian state in imposing itself on society?

Without question, voting in the Russian Empire before the reform era of the 1860s was about binding communities to the state. Responsibilities towards the state and the symbolic wholeness of the community counted for much more than representation of discrete interests via elected delegates. But, while the graphic superstructure of elections appeared securely to uphold authority much of the time, it also gave three perennial causes for concern. The first was the need to ensure the requisite level of participation, both to lend legitimacy to the process and quite simply to provide suitable candidates for office; voter absenteeism at noble elections was a problem that was not solved even by Nicholas I’s more draconian approach to the question after 1831. This electoral graphosphere was of no use if it did not have sufficient signatories. The second thorny issue for the imperial authorities was the need to prevent violations of procedure and other local abuses, of which the evidence was abundant. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was generally reluctant to annul elections, wanting above all to fill offices and maintain the regularity of elections. The notoriously fractious noble assembly in Bessarabia generated disputes over voter lists and protests over election conduct in almost every three-year cycle, but results were mostly allowed to stand.Footnote ¹⁴ Nonetheless, leniency could only be taken so far.

Thirdly, and most consequentially, the authorities had to be vigilant to ensure that the practice of voting did not give rise to notions that particular social groups were owed some form of political representation. This task was challenging enough in the post-revolutionary and post-Napoleonic era of the early nineteenth century. It became harder still following the establishment of reformed institutions of “self-government” (zemstvo assemblies and city dumas) in the 1860s and 1870s. Voting arrangements became less stable and predictable in the late nineteenth century with the emergence of new constituencies and coalitions and the weakening of traditional authority: by the 1890s many municipal dumas saw some variety of “party” conflict between groups approximating conservatives and liberals, and in the west and south of the empire these distinctions often had an ethno-confessional flavor. Voting for the State Duma in 1906 and 1907 revealed that even the peasant electorate, assumed by diehards in the tsarist establishment to be naturally conservative, was not amenable to tutelage. Written ballots—used instead of ballotirovka in city elections for the Duma—made the process more, not less contentious: voting might have been secret, but rival parties competed fiercely to get ballot papers with their list of candidates into the hands of voters. Meanwhile, disputes over published voter lists and other aspects of electoral documentary procedure became more intense and vastly more frequent. The imperial government was confronted by the central paradox of writing as a medium: this apparently fixed means for transmitting and reinforcing the word of authority could in fact give rise to conflicting uses and interpretations. The conundrum was finally resolved thirty years later by the Bolsheviks, who in the Supreme Soviet election of 1937 revealed that the written secret ballot—traditionally seen as a liberal measure of individual empowerment and agency—could instead serve the purposes of authority, unity, and homogenization.