Features of Interaction Between State Power and Civil Society in the USSR.

Neznanova Violetta Sergeevna PhD in Philosophy Associate professor, Department of State and Municipal Administration, North-West Institute of Management branch of Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration 199178, Russia, g. Saint Petersburg, ul. Srednii Prospekt V.o., 57/43 vio.vita@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

   The purpose of this article is to reveal the features of interaction between state power and civil society in the USSR, analyzing the evolution of civil society in Russia and understanding the features of the process of interaction between state power and civil society, to show what united state power and civil society in the USSR.

The formation of civil society has always been associated with the issues of improving public administration and the need for awareness of the rights and freedoms of citizens. The concept itself has a long history. Cicero, justifying the legal equality of people, wrote that the law is the connecting link of civil society, and the right established by law is common to all. At an early stage of human development, civil society was completely identified with the State. This can be explained by a number of socio-economic features: the primitive form of division of labor, the initial stage of the development of commodity-money relations, the caste nature of social culture. Actually, it was the development of public relations that served to further develop the theories of civil society. At the turn of the XVI-XVII centuries. in the works of N. Machiavelli, G. Grotius, T. Hobbes, J. Locke, S. Montesquieu, J. Rousseau justified the conformity to civil society of not all forms of government, but only those based on natural law, natural principles. Thus, J. Locke believed that an absolute monarchy is incompatible with civil society and, as an investigator, cannot be a form of civil government. N. Machiavelli considered a mixed form of government consisting of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy to be the best form of government. Each of the latter is designed to restrain and protect the other. We can find a philosophical characterization of civil society in Immanuel Kant. According to his ideas, a person should create everything on his own and bear personal responsibility for it. The clash of human interests and the need to protect them are the motivating reasons for people's self–improvement. Civil freedom, legally secured by law, is a necessary condition for self-improvement, guarantee and preservation of human dignity. G. Hegel also played an important role in the formation of ideas about civil society, defining such a society as a sphere of private interest. Here he also included the family, class relations, religion, morality, law, laws and the mutual legal relations of subjects arising from them. Hegel assigned a special role to opposing subjects. The analysis of historical data and the above judgments shows that the process of formation of civil society is complex and contradictory and spans many centuries.   ^[16]       

Civil society has many definitions, but they can all be divided into two large groups. The first group is connected with the ideas of J. Locke and I agree with his views, civil society is a group of people who live by private interests and obey the general law. The second group is connected with S. Montesquieu and here civil society is an association of free citizens inseparable from the state that regulates their relations. ^[16] For the Russian scientific tradition, the second definition is closer. A horizontal definition that builds its relations with the state, plus the protection of rights and freedoms. The vertical of power is a strict hierarchy with a rigid division of functions. Even the smallest issue has to go through all levels of bureaucracy – a lot of people, papers, stamps and, as a rule, there is little efficiency. Horizontal society is a model of self–organization, when citizens unite to independently resolve issues and dialogue with the authorities. Horizontal is the decentralization of power, the transfer of a number of powers to citizens and legislative support for civic activism.

It is obvious that civil society is a historical phenomenon. This means that there was a time when it did not exist, but now it is. However, over the three centuries of its existence, it has been constantly changing, depending on the challenges that it faced and the problems that it had to solve. But there are common grounds for civil society throughout the entire historical period of its existence. In addition to historicity, i.e. temporality, civil society also has a spatial dimension, since it does not represent absolutely the whole of society, but only a part of it. Society itself, the whole society, lives some kind of its own life, which poses corresponding problems to civil society and puts forward some challenges to which civil society must respond. Just one of the challenges realized by the philosophers of the XVIII century, in particular I. Kant, was the challenge of distinguishing between public, public and private life. ^[16] One of the main tasks of civil society was the protection of private life and the reasonable organization of public life.  In private life, the autonomy of the individual was achieved. Autonomy is literally a law – "self-law". Every person should be free from regulation, imposition by a large society of norms, rules of behavior and activity as such, as a free, autonomous person and protection of his private life and private world. The distinction between public and private life is quite complicated. Civil society has constantly limited the ability of the state, state institutions, and the church as a non-state, but autonomous institution to impose norms and rules of private life. This attitude to the limitations of the ability of the state and other institutions to interfere in a person's private life has undergone several stages during the existence of civil society. After the main stages of the conquest of rights and freedoms for each person, a certain category of open society appeared. The latter type of society, unlike civil society, is a nomination of society as a whole. An open society is a society that allows a part of society to be exactly civil, without imposing norms, laws, rules of conduct characteristic of civil society as a whole. I.e., the rest of society can be autonomous from civil society and be guided by both public imperatives and laws, and build their private lives freely, at their discretion. One of the tasks of civil society was to maintain the status of an open society as a whole, i.e. to create in society a variety of lifestyles, lifestyles, quality of life, etc., so that everyone was free to choose. But civil society is focused not on private life, but on public life. Thus, civil society, on the one hand, protects private life from the influence of the state, and on the other, maintains a public order in which everyone is guaranteed a free choice of lifestyle.

 However, all these tasks are also solved in some institutional forms, i.e. influence on the adoption of state decisions or the adoption of written laws that could guarantee this diversity of a person's private, personal life without imposing any stereotypes. This leads to the creation of special conditions for the existence of certain minorities. But not only for their existence, but also for the creation of a common infrastructure in which these minorities with their special needs could enjoy public benefits.

Thus, civil society in the most general sense is a society with developed economic, cultural, legal and political relations, independent of the state, but interacting with it.

The development of civil society in the XX century cannot be depicted only in one unfolding plot. There are two categories "the age of crowds" and "the age of the public", which arose during the discussion, the dispute between G. Lebon and G. Tarde. When the first scientist tried to understand the social structure of modern society through the form of crowd organization, Tard objected to him, calling it the age of the public. Then, with a light hand X. Ortega y Gasseta the age of crowds was widespread if not the XX century. as such, it affects the structure of totalitarian states. ^[22]. Such structures, using the technical means of their time, were able to turn the entire nation, unable to gather in one place, incapable of direct democracy, into a single crowd, subordinated to the same ideas broadcast through the media. Therefore, when Lenin, arranging the October revolution, introducing the dictatorship of the proletariat on the territory of the former Russian Empire, declared that cinema was the most important art, he meant exactly that. Such tools serve as a huge means of psychological influence on society. This allowed the whole society to lead to common attitudes, beliefs and values. Such circumstances did not allow not only critical thinking, but even other interpretations and interpretations. Therefore, it seems unrealistic to understand the development of civil society in the XX century, in particular in the USSR, without analyzing scientific and technological development, economic factors that required the unification of large groups of people to solve common problems during industrialization, etc. It is impossible to explain the phenomenon of totalitarianism in huge countries influencing world processes only by political and social categories, and it is impossible to understand how humanity overcomes the consequences of totalitarianism and the reduction of civil society with its freedom of thought, freedom to the loss of these most distinctive features. Thus, it can be concluded that the state of the globalized world in the era between the First and Second World War is characterized by the reduction of civil society to uniformity, one opinion, one power and to the complete suppression and elimination of those achievements of the XVIII century of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, which underlie civil society.

It is often possible to meet the opinion that in Russia civil society began its development only in the 90s of the XX century. In fact, this is not the case and this institution also has a long history and a number of stages of development.

Today, researchers can identify six main stages of the development of civil society in Russia. The first stage is associated with the beginning of the development of charity in Russia, which coincided with the adoption of Christianity. The Church became its main institution, providing various assistance to its flock. The second stage begins during the reign of Peter I and is characterized by purposeful assistance to those in need and increased influence on the state process. The third stage begins in the period of reforms of the 60-70s of the XIX century, when the system of regulation of charitable activities was transferred to the hands of local self-government in the person of zemstvos and city councils. The fourth stage, which began at the end of the XIX century, is associated with the rapid development of charitable institutions that are completely independent of state power. The fifth stage is the Soviet period, when elements of the non-profit sector (parties, trade unions, national control committees, various youth, veteran, women's, etc. organizations) were identified with the state, providing social justice and charity. The sixth stage can be described as modern, which began in 1992, when the dominant model is the state, in which the state acts as a client for organizations representing the non-profit sector. On the one hand, it promotes the development of civil society institutions (local self-government, non-profit organizations (called NGOs)), and on the other hand, it does not ensure full control of society over the state. ^[10]

The Soviet period of power is considered the fifth stage of the development of civil society in Russia. This period is characterized by the nationalization of civil society institutions. Of course, we can find evidence of the flourishing of popular activity – especially in the sphere of the cultural and scientific avant-garde of the 1920s. Peasant and proletarian movements, whose existence was characteristic of the whole country, stand out here. For example, each locality/district (volost) had its own peasant mutual aid society, and the Central Bureau of the Proletstudiya took care of the welfare of students in much the same way as voluntary associations did before the revolution. However, in the 1930s, this stage was replaced by a period of repression and political regulation caused by the decision of the Soviet government to forcibly collectivize agriculture and move to rapid industrialization.

 Voluntary associations created in the 1920s offered alternative solutions to social problems, but the authorities doubted the usefulness of voluntary movements and the reliability of their participants. Thousands were closed in the 1930s, and new associations were created instead, as part of the government machine. In the end, only the Red Cross and the Children's Fund remained from the original social assistance groups. New mass movements, such as the Soviet Peace Committee, the Union of Atheists or the Union of Women, had clearly communist ideology.

It was only in the late 1950s and early 1960s that civil organizations of a less politicized type began to revive, aided by Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin and the subsequent political thaw. Russian analysts have identified about 40 of them operating mainly in the field of art and science under the patronage of the Communist Party bodies and subject to the decisions of the latter on political and personnel issues. By the Brezhnev period, associations were active among such diverse groups as war veterans, professional designers and those involved in child protection.

Summing up, it is possible to conclude that in the USSR, especially at the stage of the "people's state" (60-80-ies), a model of limited public (non-state) self-government has developed, which included a number of important elements of civil society.

However, ideological, administrative and economic barriers that stood in the way of the development of free civic initiative led to an increase in public apathy, on the one hand, and sharp public discontent, on the other. An actively dissatisfied part of society took advantage of the systemic crisis of the Soviet system in the late 80s to eliminate it. A new period of national history has begun" ^[22].