• DOI:10.1177/0269142002032001564
• Corpus ID: 144067197

Soviet Democracy, 1917—91

@article{Priestland2002SovietD1,
  title={Soviet Democracy, 1917—91},
  author={David Priestland},
  journal={European History Quarterly},
  year={2002},
  volume={32},
  pages={111 - 130}
}

• D. Priestland
• Published 1 January 2002
• Sociology
• European History Quarterly

The Soviet Union was created and destroyed amidst calls for ‘democracy’. In State and Revolution, Lenin wrote of his revolutionary utopia: ‘only in communist society . . . will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized’, superseding the imperfect democracy of capitalist states.1 Seventy years later, speaking at the January 1987 Central Committee plenum, Mikhail Gorbachev also announced that ‘democratization’ was to lie at the centre of his ‘perestroika’, a process that was to lead to the demise of the system Lenin created.2 Indeed, throughout the intervening period, all Soviet leaders claimed that they were perfecting ‘Soviet democracy’. Stalin, in his notorious 1936 constitution, declared the Soviet Union the most democratic country in the world, as did Brezhnev in his constitution of 1977. Stalin even claimed that his terror of 1936–8 was, at least in part, aimed at those who were suppressing democracy. Commentators on Soviet politics have been sharply divided over how seriously to take these claims. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was common for scholars to argue that Bolshevik theory and practice did contain democratic elements, although they differed on the nature of that democracy. For some, a semiliberal democratic Bolshevism did exist, represented by Nikolai Bukharin and Lenin in his later years, which was then destroyed by Stalinist statism.3 Other commentators examined the nonpluralist participatory democracy of the Brezhnev era, arguing that it gave citizens some limited influence over particular areas of public life.4 Yet in recent years it has been rare to take ‘democracy’ or political ‘participation’ in the Soviet Union seriously.5 Lenin’s ambitious claims for the democratic nature of the new state have been seen either as cynical posturing or as a naïve utopianism that provided no answers to the problem of overDavid Priestland