The political system of Russia in the 19th-21st centuries. Prominent political figures of Russia

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:53

Our country for three centuries managed to go through almost all the regimes that exist in the interval between slavery and democracy. Nevertheless, not a single regime has ever taken place in its pure form, it has always been one or another symbiosis. And now the political system of Russia combines both elements of a democratic system and authoritarian institutions and management methods.

About hybrid modes

This scientific term refers to regimes where signs of authoritarianism and democracy are merged, and most often these systems are intermediate. There are a great many definitions here, but with the help of a comprehensive analysis, they were divided into two groups. The first group of scientists sees the hybrid regime as an illiberal democracy, that is, democracy with a minus, while the second, on the contrary, considers the political system of Russia to be competitive or electoral authoritarianism, that is, it is authoritarianism with a plus.

The very definition of "hybridregime" is quite popular, because it has a certain non-judgmental and neutrality. Many scientists are sure that the political system of Russia allows all the democratic elements inherent in it for decoration: parliamentarism, multi-party system, elections and everything that is democratic, only cover up genuine authoritarianism. However, it should be noted that that a similar imitation is moving in the opposite direction.

In Russia

The political system in Russia is trying to present itself as both more repressive and more democratic than it really is. The scale of authoritarianism - democracy is long enough for the subject of this scientific dispute to find a consensus. Most scientists tend to qualify a hybrid regime in a country where there are legally at least two political parties that participate in parliamentary elections. A multi-party system and regular election campaigns should also be legal. Then the kind of authoritarianism at least ceases to be pure. But isn't the fact that parties compete with each other important? Does the number of violations of the freedom of elections count?

Russia is a federal presidential-parliamentary republic. At least that's how it's declared. Imitation is not cheating, as the social sciences claim. This is a much more complex phenomenon. Hybrid regimes tend to have high-level corruption (including in the courts, and not only in elections), a government that is not accountable to parliament, indirect but tight control of the authorities over the media, limited civil liberties (the creation of public organizations andpublic meetings). As we all know, the political system of Russia is also showing these signs now. However, it is interesting to trace the entire path that the country has traveled in its political development.

A century earlier

It must be taken into account that Russia is in the second echelon of countries that have begun capitalist development, and it began it much later than the Western countries, which are considered leading. Nevertheless, in literally forty years, it has traveled the same path that took these countries many centuries to complete. This was due to the extremely high growth rates of industry, and they were facilitated by the economic policy of the government, which forced the development of many industries and the construction of railways. Thus, the political system of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, along with the advanced countries, entered the imperialist stage. But it was not so easy, capitalism, with such a stormy development, could not hide its bestial grin. The revolution was inevitable. Why and how did the political system of Russia change, what factors gave impetus to cardinal changes?

Pre-war situation

1. Monopolies arose rapidly, relying on a high concentration of capital and production, seizing all the dominant economic positions. The dictatorship of capital was based only on its own growth, regardless of the cost of human resources. Nobody invested in the peasantry, and it gradually lost its ability to feed the country.

2. Industry merged in the densest way with banks, grewfinancial capital, and a financial oligarchy emerged.3. Goods and raw materials were exported from the country in a stream, and the withdrawal of capital also acquired a huge scale. The forms were varied, as they are now: government loans, direct investments in the economy of other states.

4. International monopolistic unions have emerged and the struggle for raw materials, sales and investment markets has intensified.5. Competition in the sphere of influence between the rich countries of the world reached its climax, it was this that first led to a number of local wars, then the First World War unleashed. And the people are already tired of all these features of the social and political system of Russia.

Late 19th and early 20th century: economics

The industrial boom of the nineties naturally ended in a three-year severe economic crisis that began in 1900, after which an even longer depression followed - until 1908. Then, finally, it was time for some prosperity - a whole series of harvest years from 1908 to 1913 allowed the economy to make another sharp jump, when industrial production increased by one and a half times.

Prominent political figures of Russia, preparing the revolution of 1905 and numerous mass protests, have almost lost a fertile platform for their activities. Monopolization received another bonus in the Russian economy: many small enterprises died during the crisis, even more medium-sized enterprises went bankrupt during the depression, the weak left, and the strong were able to concentrateindustrial production in their hands. Enterprises massively corporatized, the time has come for monopolies - cartels and syndicates, which united in order to best sell their products.

Politics

The political system of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century was an absolute monarchy, the emperor had full power with mandatory succession to the throne. A double-headed eagle with royal regalia proudly sat on the coat of arms, and the flag was the same as today - white-blue-red. When the political system in Russia changes and the dictatorship of the proletariat sets in, the flag will simply be red. Like the blood that the people shed for many centuries. And on the coat of arms - a sickle and a hammer with ears of corn. But it will be only in 1917. And at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the system created under Alexander the First still triumphed in the country.

The State Council was deliberative: it did not decide anything, it could only express opinions. No draft without the king's signature has ever become law. The Senate ruled the judiciary. The Cabinet of Ministers ruled state affairs, but nothing was decided here without the tsar - such was the political system of Russia in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th. But the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Internal Affairs already had the broadest competences. The financiers could dictate terms to the tsar, and the secret-investigative secret police with its provocateurs, perusal of correspondence, censorship and political investigation, if not dictated, then could influence the tsar's decision in a fundamental way.

Emigration

Civil lawlessness, a difficult situation in the economy and repressions (yes, Stalin didn’t invent them!) have caused a growing and strengthening flow of emigration - and this is not the 21st century, but the 19th! The peasantry left the country, going first to neighboring states - to work, then rushed around the world, it was then that Russian settlements were created in the USA, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and even Australia. It was not the revolution of 1917 and the subsequent war that created this tide, they just kept it alive for a while.

What are the reasons for such an outflow of subjects in the nineteenth century? Not everyone could understand and accept the political system of Russia in the 20th century, so the reason is clear. But people have already fled from the absolute monarchy, how come? In addition to oppression on national grounds, the people experienced insufficient conditions for education and better professional training, citizens were looking for a worthy application of their abilities and strengths in the life around them, but this was impossible for very many reasons. And a huge part of the emigration - many thousands of people - were fighters against the autocracy, future revolutionaries, who from there led the emerging parties, published newspapers, wrote books.

Liberation Movement

Contradictions in society were so acute at the beginning of the twentieth century that they very often resulted in open protests of many thousands, a revolutionary situation was brewing by leaps and bounds. Among the students constantly ragedstorm. The working-class movement played the most essential role in this situation, and it was already so determined that by 1905 it was already making demands in combination with economic and political ones. The socio-political system of Russia noticeably staggered. In 1901, the workers of Kharkov went on strike on May Day at the same time as a strike at the Obukhov enterprise in St. Petersburg, where there were repeated clashes with the police.

By 1902, the strike swept the entire south of the country, starting from Rostov. In 1904 there was a general strike in Baku and many other cities. In addition, the movement in the ranks of the peasantry also expanded. Kharkov and Poltava rebelled in 1902, so much so that it was quite comparable to the peasant wars of Pugachev and Razin. The liberal opposition also raised its voice in the Zemstvo campaign of 1904. Under such conditions, the organization of the protest was bound to take place. True, they still hoped for the government, but it still did not take any steps towards a radical reorganization, and the long-obsolete political system of Russia was dying very slowly. In short, revolution was inevitable. And it happened on October 25 (November 7), 1917, significantly different from the previous ones: the bourgeois one of 1905 and February 1917, when the Provisional Government came into power.

Twenties of the twentieth century

The political system of the Russian Empire at that time changed dramatically. Throughout the entire territory, except for the B altic states, Finland, Western Belarus and Ukraine, Bessarabia, the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks came as a variant of the political system with one party. Other Sovietthe parties that still existed in the early twenties were crushed: the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks dissolved themselves in 1920, the Bund in 1921, and in 1922 the Socialist-Revolutionary leaders were accused of counter-revolution and terrorism, tried and repressed. The Mensheviks were treated a little more humanely, since the world community protested against the repressions. Most of them were simply expelled from the country. So the opposition was finished. In 1922, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), and this accelerated the centralization of the party, as well as the development of power technology - with a rigid vertical within the structures of local representations.

Terror drastically decreased and quickly disappeared completely, although as such a legal state in the modern sense was not built. However, already in 1922, the Civil and Criminal Codes were approved, the tribunals were abolished, the bar and the prosecutor's office were established, censorship was enshrined in the Constitution, and the Cheka was transformed into the GPU. The end of the Civil War was the time of the birth of the Soviet republics: the RSFSR, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Armenian, Azerbaijan, Georgian. There were also Khorezm and Bukhara and Far Eastern. And everywhere the Communist Party was at the head, and the state system of the Russian Federation (RSFSR) was no different from the system, say, of the Armenian. Each republic had its own constitution, its own authorities and administrations. In 1922, the Soviet states began to unite into a federal union. It was not an easy task, and it did not happen right away. The emerging Soviet Union was a federal entity where nationalformations had only cultural autonomy, but this was done exceptionally powerfully: already in the 20s, a huge number of local newspapers, theaters, national schools were created, literature in all languages of the peoples of the USSR without exception was massively published, and many peoples who did not have a written language received it, to which the brightest minds of the scientific world were involved. The Soviet Union showed unsurpassed power, despite the fact that the country was twice in ruins. However, seventy years later, it was not war, not deprivation, but … satiety and contentment that killed him. And traitors within the ruling class.

21st century

What is today's regime? This is no longer the 90s, when the authorities reflected only the interests of the bourgeoisie and oligarchy that suddenly appeared. The broad philistine masses were warmed up by the media in their own interest and in the hope of soon "unwind". It was not a system, but rather its absence. Complete robbery and chaos. What now? Now the state system of the Russian Federation, according to some experts, is very reminiscent of Bonapartist. An appeal to the modern Russian program of transformations allows us to see similar parameters in it. This program began to be implemented as a correction of the previous course of radical social transformations associated with the rejection of the rather bored Soviet model of society, and in this sense, of course, has a conservative orientation. The legitimizing formula of the new Russian political system today also hasdual nature, based both on democratic elections and traditional Soviet legitimacy.

State capitalism - where is it?

There is an opinion that under Soviet rule there was a system of state capitalism. However, any capitalism relies primarily on profit. Now, it is very similar to this system with its state corporations. But in the USSR, even when Kosygin tried to find economic levers of control, this did not happen at all. In the Soviet Union, the system was transitional, with features of socialism and, to a lesser extent, capitalism. Socialism manifested itself not so much in the distribution of public consumer funds with state guarantees for the elderly, the sick and the disabled. Recall that even pensions for all appeared only at the last stage of the country's existence.

But the organization in the management of social life and the economy was not at all capitalist, it was completely built on technocratic principles, and not on capitalist ones. However, the Soviet Union did not know socialism in its pure form, except that there was public ownership of the means of production. However, state property is not a synonym for public property, since there is no way to dispose of it, and sometimes even know how to do it. Openness in a constantly hostile environment is impossible, so even information was a state monopoly. No publicity where the layer of managers disposed of information as private property. Social equality is the principle of socialism, which, by the way, allows inequalitymaterial. There is no antagonism between classes, not a single social stratum was suppressed by others, and therefore it never occurred to anyone to defend social privileges. However, there was a powerful army, and around it - a lot of officials who had not only a huge difference in salaries, but also had a whole system of benefits.

Cooperation

Socialism in its purest form, as Marx saw it, cannot be built in a single country. The famous Trotskyist of the twenties of the twentieth century, Saakhobaev, argued that the salvation of the world is only in the world revolution. But it is impossible, since the contradictions are basically transferred from the countries of the first echelon of industrialization to the countries of the third world. But we can recall the undeservedly trampled teachings of Lenin, who proposed changing the point of view and building socialism in the form of a society of civilized cooperators.

State property should not be transferred to cooperatives, but the principles of self-government should be introduced at all enterprises. The Jews understood him correctly - in the kibbutzim there are all the features of the society that Vladimir Ilyich described. Trade union enterprises operate in the same way in America, and during perestroika, we also had people's enterprises of this kind. However, under capitalism, the prosperity of such industries is problematic. At best, they make the enterprises of the collective capitalist. Only the seizure of all political power by the proletariat can serve as the basis for building socialism.