After the Second World War, the Soviet Union established the Central and Western Europe as its sphere of domination. In the states which found themselves within it, absolute power was assumed by communist parties, which followed instructions coming from Moscow. All the satellite states of the USSR were obliged to implement policies determined at the Kremlin. In all those states government was based on the authority of one party, whose ostensible task was to represent ‘the working people of the city and the village’.

Regardless of that, not in one of those satellite states did the communists resign from organising cyclic elections to representative bodies, even though such elections were a caricature of true, democratic elections. Their outcome was decided in advance: the communist party had to win. The manner of organising elections which guaranteed this outcome had been designed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The principle was ‘one candidate per one seat’. All candidates were carefully selected by the communist party, based on parities determined by its leadership. Submissions of independent candidatures were blocked by the party itself or by the electoral mechanism served by persons whom the party trusted. The voting itself remained a pure formality, the voters were not given any room to make a real choice.

Soviet electoral practices constituted a model for all the countries of the Soviet bloc, but not in all cases was this model faithfully copied. With time, in some of the socialist states in Europe there appeared steadily growing deviations from the ‘ideal’, that is Soviet, electoral model. This is what happened in, among others, the People’s Republic of Poland.

The first elections to the Sejm, i.e. the Polish Parliament, after the period of the communists’ struggle for power in the 1940s, which took place in October 1952, were conducted in accordance with the above-mentioned Soviet principle of one candidate per one seat. Yet already at this early stage the Polish electoral system differed from the one operative in the USSR, taking into consideration some of Poland’s political traditions and features of its system: traditional names and formal relations in most of the institutions of the legislative and executive powers were retained and voters voted in multi-seat constituencies (in the USSR the constituencies were single-seat).

More significant changes occurred in the mid-1950s, in the period of the ‘Thaw’ after Stalin’s death. In Poland, this process involved limited democratisation. In the Sejm elections of January 1957, the voters were given a chance of choosing the best candidate from a slate: there were more candidates than seats to be taken. The Polish authorities quickly abandoned the drive towards democratisation in favour of stabilisation (which meant, first and foremost, the stabilisation of the incontestable power of the Polish United Workers’ Party), but in the following decades of the communist rule in Poland the practice of putting up a larger number of candidates for all the elections was retained (although, invariably, only one slate was registered per constituency). Voters participating in the elections were able to cross out the candidates they did not support and vote only for those they preferred. This was the most significant Polish deviation from the Soviet electoral system.

What the other deviations may have been, in what respects the elections in the USSR and communist-ruled Poland were entirely similar, and whether the differences had any real bearing on the functioning of state socialism in the Polish version – I attempt to answer these questions in my article A Polish invention or a copy of the Soviet model? Electoral practices during parliamentary elections in Poland under the communist rule (1944–1980).