1918: CONSTITUTIONAL CHOICE

The article highlights one of the most important issues of the Soviet political and legal history. The choice of political form, which was made almost immediately after the victory of the Bolsheviks in the 1917 Revolution, meant the transfer of the country to a new path of state building. The Soviets became an alternative to the parliamentary Republic. The article analyzes the basic principles of both political systems and the reasons for this choice. It emphasizes the supranational nature of the political direction, the so-called "direct action", which took place not only in Russia but also in a number of European countries. The author notes the determining influence that both national political traditions and borrowings from Western European systems had on the formation of the representative system. In the European historical experience of parliamentarism, the new Russia was accepted in the absence of political legitimate parties. The system of Soviets essentially denied the "bourgeois" principles of separation of powers, implementing the experience of the French revolution for this purpose. However, the full power of local councils, for example, clearly exceeded the competence of municipal European bodies. The Soviets claimed the same universality as the Parliament had. Unlike it, they had a whole system of hierarchically built local authorities. The Soviet democracy is prone to unanimity and unfriendly attitude to the opposition, which is always in the minority. This principle ("democratic centralism") was reinforced by the existence of a hierarchical system of councils, which was a sufficiently effective filter for decision-making processes. The emergency powers of the Soviets especially increased in the context of the civil war and the fight against intervention. Under these conditions, the process of constitutional construction acquired specific features and the Constitution of 1918 became a kind of documentary of the historical era.

parliament, councils, democracy, dictatorship, representation, direct action, legitimacy, legality, declaration, separation of powers, law, government, power, force, legality

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