this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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There's a bunch of reasons that play out differently over different time periods.
revolutionary fervor - people were enthusiastic, the masses generally were coming off a 4-year cycle of famines that had been going on for over a century. Anyone who was in position at the beginning of the revolution was likely hell bent on the overarching goals of the revolution and there was a lot of support for that
single candidates - in the early days there wasn't a highly developed political culture with established offices and expectations. Things being fresh all that mattered was that someone who cared took on the role and carried it out faithfully. There wasn't really anything to gain from being in these offices since they were legally bound to do the will of the people or get recalled. Later as the party leadership entered into war footing the risks of factionalism were too great to allow and candidates were selected and removed based on their willingness to support the war effort.
vote manipulation - in the declining days it is likely that as the liberals sought legitimacy through aesthetics that vote manipulation happened more frequently
normal electoral behavior - this is normal even in liberal democracies experiencing massive internal conflict like the US
here's a NYT article from 2024 showing 70% of elections in the US are single candidate elections
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/us/election-uncontested-races.html
But maybe the least comfortable truth that Westerners have to face even to this day is just how popular the leaders are that our Western governments smear with propaganda.
This paper by Western researchers strictly controlled for as many manipulative effects as they could find, and what they found was that Putin in 2015 had a national approval rating at 80% or above, something completely unthinkable in the West
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2692049
Under the Soviet Union, before liberalization, there was even greater national unity than there is in Russia today. It is easy to see how votes might turn out the way they did and it is inappropriate to believe there is a single reason and that the single reason is that democracy didn't exist.