Perestroika Era Politics: The New Soviet Legislature and Gorbachev's Political Reforms: The New Soviet Legislature and Gorbachev's Political Reforms by Robert T. Huber & Larry D. Kelley

Author:Robert T. Huber & Larry D. Kelley [Huber, Robert T. & Kelley, Larry D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781315488479
Google: uMkYDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32207231
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1990-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

7

Party Formation and Deformation on Russia's Democratic Left

Michael E. Urban

Political Parties in Depoliticized Context

The rich variety of political species that have appeared in the course of Soviet society's reawakening plays havoc with many of our conventional categories. What are we to make, for instance, of a situation in which communists are regarded as "conservatives" and proponents of capitalism as "left-wing radicals"? How is it that monarchists are often enough numbered among the "democratic forces"? Moreover, in focusing our attention on the proper object of this chapter, namely, those organizations on the "democratic left" that have chosen to call themselves political parties, we immediately encounter a number of reasons for adopting a skeptical attitude toward this appellation itself. Programs regularly fail to distinguish one "party" from another, their memberships are usually small and fluid, they claim insignificant portions of electoral support, their leaders often spend inordinate amounts of time quarreling with one another, leading in turn to what have become all but predictable results--expulsions, walkouts, and the consequent founding of yet more "parties."

In order to come to grips with this baffling phenomenon of party formation on Russia's democratic left, we might begin by reminding ourselves that political parties are expressive institutions. Whether in one instance they articulate the concrete demands of a social group or, in another, the worldview of a social class or, in yet a third, the aspirations of a particular people, their common denominator consists in the fact that they are expressing something, (allegedly) on someone's behalf, to someone else. Parties, then, constitute a singularly important means by which a given society maintains a political dialogue with itself.

Our topic also forcefully recalls the fact that, in addition to being expressive institutions, political parties are themselves expressions of the society in which they have emerged. They reflect that society's history as stored in, and interpreted through, its culture; at any moment in time they manifest on the political level that society's structure of power and extant challenges to it; collectively, and with discordant voices, they disclose that society's visions of its own future. When viewed from this perspective, the Russian parties look less like discrete "things," bewildering in their odd array and strange behavior, and more like the recognizable products of a system undergoing deep and profound transformation. At the core of this transformation--and certainly the very emergence of political parties testifies to this fact--is the rebirth of political society in the Soviet Union. On one hand, this involves the idea of expression in the first sense mentioned above, the sense in which some seventy years of the Communist Party's political monologue is now giving way to a political dialogue in which different points of view contend. On the other hand, however, what is being expressed to, and on behalf of, whom is a matter determined by our second concept of expression, in which parties are themselves expressions of the social context in which they are rooted. What might appear to us on first inspection, since we are looking

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