• Parliaments and parliamentarism in the works of Soviet dissidents, 1960s–80s

    Author(s):
    Ivan Sablin (see profile)
    Date:
    2019
    Group(s):
    ASEEES Convention
    Subject(s):
    History, Intellectual life, Concepts, Russia, Soviet Union
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    dissident, Parliamentarism, samizdat, Supreme Soviet, USSR, Intellectual and conceptual history, Intellectual history, Russian history, Soviet history
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/05yk-aq43
    Abstract:
    Drawing from samizdat (self-published) and tamizdat (foreign-published) materials, this article traces the understandings of parliaments and parliamentarism in individual works by Soviet dissidents and reconstructs the authors’ underlying assumptions in the application of the two ideas. It focuses on the articulations and the implications of four concepts pertaining to parliamentarism – deliberation, representation, responsibility, and sovereignty – in the dissidents’ criticisms of Soviet ‘parliamentarism’ and their own parliamentary designs. Despite the consensus that the USSR Supreme Soviet was both a façade and pseudo parliament and the frequent appeals to popular sovereignty, only a handful of authors discussed parliamentarism as the latter’s manifestation before the Perestroika. With very few dissidents placing deliberation at the centre of a post-Soviet order, the conviction that social and political systems should be based on an ‘ultimate truth’ and respective societal blueprints dominated the dissident discourse in which a parliament, if mentioned at all, was a rostrum rather than a forum.
    Notes:
    The research for this article was done as part of the project ‘ENTPAR: Entangled Parliamentarisms: Constitutional Practices in Russia, Ukraine, China and Mongolia, 1905–2005’, which received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 755504).
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1080/02606755.2019.1615672
    Publisher:
    Informa UK Limited
    Pub. Date:
    2019-5-10
    Journal:
    Parliaments, Estates and Representation
    Page Range:
    1 - 19
    ISSN:
    0260-6755,1947-248X
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    4 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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