How important was citizen participation in Soviet decision-making Essay

How important was citizen participation in Soviet decision-making - Essay Example 46). Only in the beginning of 1990s, citizens of the former Soviet Union 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 hadn't happened. "Now 1991 is referred to as the "collapse" or "falling-apart" (raspad), a word with almost purely negative connotations, even 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 knowledge in this area is highly disordered disorientation and blurred as for a very long time nearly 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 we'll investigate the Soviet era itself with its "backwardness". We will view the question through the prism of the course of comparatively recent history from 1917 to 1991. In short, our incentive is not to prove that twentieth century Russia and the whole USSR was backward but to demonstrate how decisive this backwardness was and even is for Russian and Soviet self-understanding (Fitzpatrick 2000, p. 378). Russia's "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 intelligentsia's 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 Russia's 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 condition" (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 masses out of backwardness. And after the winning of Revolution they declared their vanguard in the whole world (Sherman 1990 p. 14). These events were profoundly based on their Marxist perception of history, with its ideas and postulates