Let me answer your quote with my own (I have nobody to send it to, but I want to tell people about this great book I am epub-ing).

All over the country for more than a month elections had been going on in far-away factories and villages. Soviet elections do not take place on a single day but are determined by local convenience within a period of several weeks prior to the convening of an All-Union Congress. Localities choose dates which will enable their outgoing governments to finish their business, and give the incoming governments time to prepare demands for the All-Union Congress. These candidates and demands had been subjects of much discussion. But the attitude to the elections expressed itself rather in action than in talk. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were joining collective farms "to break with the past and enter the elections as collective farmers." Factory workers were energetically completing new models of locomotives, turbines, inventions, to send as presents to the coming congress. There were, in fact, so many of these presents that the sending of most of them was ordered confined to reports.