How important was citizen participation in Soviet decision-making Essay

How important was citizen participation in Soviet decision-making - Essay Example46).Only in the beginning of 1990s, citizens of the former Soviet essence began to speak about the 74 years of Soviet regime as a blank space in the course of national history, a blunder, a roundabout way, as something that virtually better hadnt happened. Now 1991 is referred to as the collapse or falling-apart (raspad), a word with almost purely negative connotations, crimson though people also tell opinion-pollers that they would not want to go back to the old order (Sherman 1990 p. 15).Besides there is no doubt that cognition in this area is highly disordered disorientation and blurred as for a very long time n too soon until the beginning of perestroika the Soviet Union remained a skilfully isolated and closed political system (Segal, Batt, Buzan, Duncan, Goodman, Price, Margot, Williams & Womack 1992).In our work well investigate the Soviet era itself with its backwardness. We will view the enqu ire through the prism of the course of comparatively recent history from 1917 to 1991. In short, our inducing is not to prove that twentieth century Russia and the whole USSR was backward just now to demonstrate how decisive this backwardness was and notwithstanding is for Russian and Soviet self-understanding (Fitzpatrick 2000, p. 378).Russias backwardness as compared with the Wes... 104) Russia as third Rome were still general and common, but even the supporters of such concepts like Slavophiles often had prejudice and concerning the universal Russian intelligentsias sense of inferiority about west countries that were considered to be more developed (Motyl 1990, p. 211). Marxist revolutionaries as a group of the radical intelligentsia which appeared in the beginning of the 20th century got the name the Bolsheviks. Socialism implies for them a lot, but what appeared to be the most essential, as became clearly understandable after they gain power in the October Revolution in 1917 , was the process of modernization or modification the whole society. Their fundamental incentive was the surmounting of historic backwardness of the country (Drakulic 1987). The Bolsheviks considered that this so-called economic and cultural backwardness was the result of quantity of the non-Slavic peoples of the North and East and dark peasantry. Since Russias population in the early twentieth century was 80 per cent peasant, and non-Slavs constituted close to half of the population of the state that in 1923 became the Soviet Union that meant that backwardness was the prevailing position (Fitzpatrick 2000, p. 378). The Bolsheviks considered themselves a vanguard party. Strictly speaking, this implied that they represented the vanguard of the proletariat and in broader meaning, it implied a vanguard of education with the main aim to steer the public quite a little out of backwardness. And after the winning of Revolution they declared their vanguard in the whole world (Sherman 199 0 p. 14). These events were profoundly based on their Marxist perception of history, with its ideas and postulates