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Will Soviet Private Enterprise Survive?
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17687 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1990 |
3,260 Words |
| Author
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Alexandra Costa
Alexandra Costa is a former Soviet citizen who now lives in
the United States. She writes and lectures on Soviet affairs. |
The news coming out of the Soviet Union in March was encouraging, or even, for some, euphoric. The Supreme Soviet made certain changes in the Soviet constitution: It removed the constitutional monopoly of the Communist Party on power; established the new office of president, giving it new, expanded powers; and, not surprisingly, elected Mikhail Gorbachev to fill that office. However, in the tidal wave of speculation of how the new Soviet president was going to use his expanded powers, the significance of other events taking place in the Soviet political system got somewhat lost.
The results of at least one of these events - the elections to regional and city councils and republican parliaments of three Slavic republics of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Belorussia - may more profoundly affect the eventual development of democratic structures in the USSR than many people here realize.
To explain the importance of these elections, one must go back into Soviet history. The initial slogan of the Bolshevik Revolution was "All power to the soviets!" The word soviet in Russian means "council." Therefore, the initial idea was to give all power to the elected councils of workers and peasants; that is, they would be self-governing.
This idea did not survive for long in its pure form. The necessity to protect the communist power imposed on the country by a minority Bolshevik party led to the creation of a strong centralized power structure, and it was the Communist Party that became this structure. The process was started by Lenin and perfected by Stalin, who, by building the strong and all-encompassing hierarchy of the party patronage
... (1997 of 19783 Characters)
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