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 machine and physically annihilating those who dared to deviate from the party (or, rather, his) line, created the enduring power structure that has existed in the USSR since the 1930s.
Two main features of this system are the pyramidal, centrally planned economic system, where the decisions made at the top are passed down to the bottom for mandatory implementation, and control by the party apparatus (with the help of the KGB) of all facets of life.
Under these conditions, the local councils did exist, but, just like the Supreme Soviet, merely as rubber-stamp bodies. Although formally they were "elected," in reality their members were selected by the local party authorities and then presented to the voters as a slate. Of course, the slate included all the top party officials, plus the necessary window dressing - a sprinkling of loyal representatives of the workers. Therefore, though formally it is the regional and city councils that are supposed to formulate the local development policy in the USSR, in reality they are ere extensions of the party apparatus.
As one entity, however, the joint forces of the party and the local councils wield absolute power in localities. Together they determine allocation of the local budget and, most importantly, appoint the local executive committees - the people who actually run day-to-day life of the region or city. These committees, and the local bureaucrats under their control, are in charge of buildings, sewers, streets, permits, and other mundane aspects of everyday life. In that respect, they function much like an American city government, with the chairman of the city council being equivalent to the
...
Read Full Article
|
