ABSTRACT
This chapter showed that in 1935, the Soviet leadership made another concession to the universalist take on modernity by announcing plans to introduce a “parliament” in the USSR. The 1936 Soviet Constitution and the introduction of the Supreme Soviet, however, did not change the operation of the single-party and personal dictatorship. The Supreme Soviet was de facto appointed by the party and had no agency in decision-making. Its main functions were symbolic and propagandistic. The elections and the sessions were supposed to demonstrate the total loyalty of the population. Its members, however, had some practical functions in policy fine-tuning and acted as intermediaries between the state and the people. The Supreme Soviet also became a model for the parliaments that were used during the Soviet annexations of 1939–1940 and for the legislatures of the USSR's dependencies after the Second World War. The practice of the Soviet regime led to some discontent and small-scale protest actions across the USSR, but no public criticism of the state was possible. Internationally, Soviet institutions were praised by communists and some on the broader left. Émigré authors continued to denounce the Soviet regime, contributing to the proliferation of a critical take on Soviet institutions.
