Did the Soviet Union have any form of democracy?

[Arakir]

Did the USSR, and other Marxist-Leninist countries, implement any form of democracy? How did leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others get into positions of power?

[Delenda Carthago]

http://books.google.gr/books/about/Soviet_local_government.html?id=GCw5AQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y

[LOLseph Stalin]

Democratic centralism as far as I know.

[tuwix]

Did the USSR, and other Marxist-Leninist countries, implement any form of democracy?


In exact meaning of this word, no.



How did leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others get into positions of power?

Lenin and Mao have become leaders of party which has made a revolution. Stalin was chosen by party's Politburo in times where party was only bureaucracy pretty much and doesn't have not much to do with working class yet.

[Sheepy]

Nope!

[Delenda Carthago]

Stalin was chosen by party's Politburo in times where party was only bureaucracy pretty much and doesn't have not much to do with working class yet.
100% false.

[Zealot]

I'll just repost what I've written elsewhere:

With regards to democracy in the Soviet Union it might be helpful to read the short pamphlet The Soviet Socialist State. (http://sovietlibrary.org/Library/Union%20of%20Soviet%20Socialist%20Republics/1951_The%20Soviet%20Socialist%20State_1951_e-book.pdf) It's standard Soviet propaganda (Political Education Series, as it says on my copy) and so should be read with a critical mind. Nevertheless, it does give a brief explanation of the way that democracy worked in the Soviet Union. I would go so far as to say that the USSR had one of the most democratic systems during its time relative to what bourgeois governments had in place.

For example, people of all nationalities and ethnicities had the right to vote in the Soviets at 18. In fact, the "upper house" of the Soviet legislature (the Supreme Soviet) was called the "Soviet of Nationalities" and was directly elected. Meanwhile, in many bourgeois democracies from America to Australia, minorities didn't have voting rights until the civil rights movement from the 1960s onwards! Moreover, the age of voting was 20+ in many countries and in some bourgeois democracies you had to pay a "Poll Tax" (i.e., pay to make a vote) and/or meet property requirements. This was not the case in the USSR. Not to mention the rights and economic rights that Soviet citizens had, such as free healthcare, something which apparently the Americans are still struggling to implement (note that FDR actually proposed an "Economic Bill of Rights" which was promptly forgotten about after his death).

Was the Supreme Soviet a "rubber-stamp" legislature (i.e., did it simply approve whatever the Communist Party wanted to legislate)?

Much of this argument is based around the fact that the Supreme Soviet did not meet very often and would carry out its approval or rejection of legislation at rare intervals. They therefore conclude that the legislature had no real power in the way that, for example, the American Congress has. This simply displays ones ignorance of the Soviet political system. The answer to this is that much of the powers that the American Congress has finds its parallel in the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which in turn was elected at a joint sitting of the two chambers of the Supreme Soviet. The Presidium had powers to declare war, ratify treaties, etc., etc., in the same manner as the US Congress.

The Soviet Union was a one-party state with hand-picked candidates at elections!?

The Communist Party was the only legal political party, that is true. However, one did not need to be a member of the Communist Party to stand as a candidate in elections. Trade Unions, cultural and scientific societies, youth organisations and so on also had the right to put forward candidates at elections. Furthermore, if you look around the world at the various bourgeois democracies, they are either one-party or two-party states. In New Zealand it's Labour and National, in America it's Republican and Democrat. The two parties are always just two sides of the same coin and really do not differ in a very radical way. The two dominant parties in Colombia, for example, actually made agreements on how to share power for many years. In other countries, from Singapore to Botswana, one party has dominated the entire government since "democracy" was first implemented.

[Killer Enigma]

Red Godfather's post is incredibly insightful. Similarly related is a post on Return to the Source detailing the multitude of ways that workers control the means of production through trade unions, among other institutions, in socialist countries. You can check it out here (http://return2source.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/the-trade-unions-actually-existing-socialism-a-point-of-comparison-for-the-american-worker/).

You will find that most people who deny 'democracy' - whatever that really means - in the socialist countries have an ill-conceived, reformed idea of Western democracy in their mind as an ideal. That or they believe in some silly arrangement of local communes that has never existed, lasted, and flourished in the modern era. Socialist countries have their flaws, but the critique of 'democracy' is the most patently absurd (and truly one peculiar to the Western world, where we have this endemic fixation on democracy as the gold-standard of a just society). If we're talking about people in the US, none of us have ever lived in a democratic society. What makes us so qualified to say what a true democracy looks like, indeed? I think an honest assessment of the facts shows that socialist countries are far more 'democratic' than anything in the Western world, in terms of the government serving the needs and demands of working people.

[DROSL]

You should start to read. wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy