What if the Soviet Union returned? It was one of the most powerful empires in history. On December 28, 1922, after a conference attended by delegations from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other republics, the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was announced. The Soviet Union repelled Nazi aggression during World War II and then collapsed. What if the Soviet Union were resurrected today?

To begin with, we must determine the countries that will be included in the modern Soviet Union. It will include the following states: Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The Soviet Union will be a very large country and, of course, the largest republic in terms of area will be Russia, whose area is larger than the area of ​​Pluto. The Soviet Union will be larger than Australia, Antarctica and South America combined, making it a nation larger than three continents. Such a colossal territory will create a great difference in time between the two ends of the Soviet Union, when it will be 11 pm in one part of the country and noon in the other.

Context

I want to return to the USSR

London Review of Books 01/06/2018

CIS - the last breath of the USSR

EurasiaNet 15.12.2017

And the USSR still hasn't gone anywhere

Delfi.lv 26.09.2017 Population

The total population of the Soviet Union will be 294.837 million people. It will be ranked fourth in the list of countries by population after the United States, which is now in third place. Surprisingly, the Soviet Union had roughly the same population in 1991, at 293,048,000, indicating that population growth has been weak since the fall of the Soviet Union. Most citizens of the Soviet Union will be Russians (about 46% of the total population), with Ukrainians and Uzbeks taking an honorable second place. Russian would be the most widely spoken language in the Soviet Union, with approximately 58% of the population speaking it. To recreate the Soviet Union, we must return to the memory of the Communist Party as the only legitimate party with absolute power. Religious people will only be able to perform their rituals in religious centers and will not be able to do so in public. However, only 12% of the population will be atheist or non-religious, but the vast majority of the population, about 54%, will be Orthodox Christian, 3% Catholic, 24% Sunni, 3% Shia and 4% will represent other religions.

Economic and political situation

Speaking of the status and political organization of the Soviet Union, we must guess that its capital will be in Moscow. In addition, the Soviet Union will have a number of large influential cities, such as St. Petersburg, which will be renamed Leningrad, Kyiv in Ukraine and Minsk in Belarus. The economy will be strong enough - GDP will be about two trillion dollars. Russia currently ranks 12th in terms of economic development. By joining the Soviet Union, it will reach eighth place in the world, ahead of such countries as South Korea and Canada. The per capita income level would be relatively low, at $6.8, which would put the Soviet Union in 76th place ahead of Bulgaria. The military budget of the Soviet army will be 80 billion dollars, which will put it in fourth place after Saudi Arabia, China and the United States.

However, this will not be a big problem, as the number of troops compensates for the lack of funding. It will take the second place in terms of the number of military personnel after China, with about 1.43 million people. There will be about 2.88 million in reserve. And in total, about 4.32 million people are ready for military action, which is equal to the population of New Zealand. The total strength of the Soviet army would be the same as that of the Chinese army and 42% larger than that of the Americans. The Soviet army will have the largest arsenal of weapons in the world, with a total of 7,300 missile warheads, while the US will only have 6,970 warheads. In addition, the Soviet Union will become the largest oil-producing country, ahead of Saudi Arabia and the United States. It will produce about 12.966 million barrels of oil.

Can he be even stronger? Of course, if we add to the Soviet Union all the regions that once belonged to the Russian Empire. Let's add Finland, half of today's Poland and all of Alaska. This will increase the population of the Union to approximately 496.313 million, thus overtaking the United States. The economic situation will improve: GDP will reach 2.541 trillion dollars, which will lift the country to sixth place. Thus, she will overtake France and India, but will give way to Great Britain and Germany.

Finally, if the Soviet Union is revived, it will not be much stronger than last time. It will have the most missile warheads in the world, the second largest army, and become the leader in oil production. There will probably be no alliance between the Soviet Union, the US and NATO, so the Soviet Union will look for alliances in Africa and Asia.

The materials of InoSMI contain only assessments of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the editors of InoSMI.

Leprosy is caused by mycobacteria, which were discovered in the 1870s by the Norwegian physician Gerhard Hansen. So far, the bacteria have been found to be transmitted through secretions from the nose and mouth. The disease mainly affects the skin, mucous membranes and peripheral nervous system.

The incubation period for leprosy can be up to 20 years. The first clinical signs of the disease include deterioration in general well-being, drowsiness, chills, runny nose, rashes on the skin and mucous membranes, loss of hair and eyelashes, decreased sensitivity.

Leprosy in the USSR

Until 1926, there were only 9 leper colonies in the USSR, that is, specialized hospitals for lepers. They contained a total of 879 patients. Later, the number of leper colonies increased to 16.

Every year in the Soviet Union new patients with leprosy were detected. True, the number of cases has steadily decreased every decade. So from 1961 to 1970, 546 cases of leprosy were registered in the RSFSR, from 1971 to 1980 - 159, and from 1981 to 1990 - only 48. The highest incidence rate was in Siberia and the Far East, as well as in such union republics as Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Karakalpakstan.

Lifetime isolation

Until the 1950s, the concept of "outpatient treatment of patients with leprosy" did not exist at all. The newly diagnosed patients were doomed to lifelong isolation in leper colonies. So, for example, the resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of July 10, 1923 read: "Assign the people's commissariats of health to keep an accurate record of all patients with leprosy and take care of the mandatory isolation of patients." Despite the fact that the decree also spoke about the possibility of treating lepers at home, in reality this was practically not carried out.

In fact, patients with leprosy were equated with criminals or enemies of the people. All medical institutions were located more than 100 kilometers from large cities, where patients were sent to eternal exile.

All lepers were subject to strict accounting and control. For each of them, an individual card was compiled, which indicated not only the data of the patient himself, but also all the information about the persons who had contact with him.

Patients diagnosed with leprosy could not engage in certain types of work, receive education, serve in the army, and even use public transport.

Young children of the sick were subject to seizure and placement in boarding schools. Most often, sick parents were forever deprived of the opportunity to even see them.

Those who could not stand isolation and escaped from the leper colony fell under criminal liability, they were put on the All-Union wanted list and rounded up.

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“We were lucky that our childhood and youth ended before the government bought FREEDOM from the youth in exchange for roller skates, mobile phones, star factories and cool crackers (by the way, soft for some reason) ... With her common consent ... For her own (seemingly) good…” is a fragment from a text called “Generation 76-82”. Those who are now somewhere in their thirties reprint it with great pleasure on the pages of their Internet diaries. He became a kind of manifesto of the generation.

The attitude towards life in the USSR changed from a sharply negative to a sharply positive one. Recently, a lot of resources have appeared on the Internet dedicated to everyday life in the Soviet Union.

Unbelievable but true: the sidewalk has an asphalt ramp for wheelchairs. Even now you rarely see this in Moscow

At that time (as far as photographs and films can tell) all the girls wore knee-length skirts. And there were practically no perverts. An amazing thing.

Excellent bus stop sign. And the pictogram of the trolleybus is the same in St. Petersburg today. There was also a tram sign - the letter "T" in a circle.

All over the world, the consumption of various branded drinks was growing, and we had everything from the boiler. This, by the way, is not so bad. And, most likely, humanity will come to this again. All foreign ultra-left and green movements would be delighted to know that in the USSR you had to go for sour cream with your own can. Any jar could be handed over, the sausage was wrapped in paper, and they went to the store with their string bag. The most progressive supermarkets in the world today at the checkout offer to choose between a paper or plastic bag. The most environmentally responsible classes are returning the earthenware yogurt pot to the store.

And before, there was no habit at all to sell containers with the product.

Kharkov, 1924. Tea room. He drank and left. No Lipton bottled.

Moscow, 1959. Khrushchev and Nixon (then Vice President) at the Pepsi booth at the American National Exhibition in Sokolniki. On the same day there was a famous dispute in the kitchen. In America, this dispute has received wide coverage, we have not. Nixon talked about how cool it was to have a dishwasher, how much stuff there was in supermarkets.

All this was filmed on color videotape (supertechnology at the time). It is believed that Nixon performed so well at this meeting that it helped him become one of the presidential candidates the following year (and 10 years later, president).

In the 60s, a terrible fashion for any machine guns went. The whole world then dreamed of robots, we dreamed of automatic trading. The idea, in a sense, failed due to the fact that it did not take into account Soviet reality. Say, when a potato vending machine pours you rotten potatoes, no one wants to use it. Still, when there is an opportunity to rummage through an earthy container, finding some relatively strong vegetables, there is not only hope for a delicious dinner, but a training in fighting qualities. The only machines that survived were those that dispensed a product of the same quality - for the sale of soda. Still sometimes there were vending machines for the sale of sunflower oil. Only soda survived.

1961st. VDNH. Still, before the start of the fight against excesses, we did not lag behind the West in graphic and aesthetic development.

In 1972, the Pepsi company agreed with the Soviet government that Pepsi would be bottled "from concentrate and using PepsiCo technology", and in return the USSR would be able to export Stolichnaya vodka.

1974th. Some boarding house for foreigners. Polka dots "Globe" top right. I still have such a jar unopened - I keep thinking: will it explode or not? Just in case, I keep it wrapped in a bag away from books. It’s also scary to open it - what if I suffocate?

From the very right edge, next to the scales, you can see a cone for selling juice. Empty, really. There was no habit in the USSR to drink juice from the refrigerator, no one was chic. The saleswoman opened a three-liter jar, poured it into a cone. And from there - in glasses. As a child, I still found such cones in our vegetable shop on Shokalsky Drive. When I was drinking my favorite apple juice from such a cone, some thief stole my Kama bike from the store's dressing room, I will never forget.

1982 Selection of alcohol in the dining car of the Trans-Siberian train. For some reason, many foreigners have a fixed idea - to travel along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Apparently, the idea that you can not get out of a moving train for a week seems magical to them.

Please note that abundance is apparent. No exquisite dry red wines, which today, even in an ordinary tent, at least 50 types are sold. No XO and VSOP. However, even ten years after this picture was taken, the author was quite satisfied with Agdam port wine.

1983 The worm of consumerism has settled in the naive and pure souls of the Russians. True, the bottle, young man, must be returned to whom she said. I drank, enjoyed the warm, return the container. They will take her back to the factory.

In stores, Pinocchio or Bell was usually on sale. "Baikal" or "Tarhun" was also not always sold. And when Pepsi was exhibited in some supermarket, it was taken as a reserve - for a birthday, for example, to be displayed later.

1987th. An aunt sells greens in a dairy store window. Cashiers are visible behind the glass. The very ones that had to come well prepared - to know all the prices, the quantity of goods and the department numbers.

1987th. Volgograd. In the American archive, this photo is accompanied by a comment of the century: "A woman on a street in Volgograd sells some sort of liquid for the invalids of the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet name for World War II)." Apparently, at the same time in 87, they translated the inscription from the barrel, when there was no one else to ask that WWII invalids were served out of turn. By the way, these inscriptions are the only documentary recognition that there are queues in the USSR.

By the way, in those days there was no struggle between merchandisers, there were no POS materials, no one hung wobblers on the shelves. No one would have thought of giving away free samples. If the store was given a beach ball with the Pepsi logo, he considered it an honor. And exhibited in the window sincerely and for nothing.

1990th. Pepsi vending machine in the subway. Rare copy. Here are the machines that are on the right, they met everywhere in the center - they sold the newspapers Pravda, Izvestia, Moskovskiye Novosti. By the way, all soda machines (and slot machines too) always had the inscription “Please! Do not omit commemorative and bent coins. It is understandable with bent ones, but commemorative coins cannot be omitted, because they differed from other coins of the same denomination in weight and sometimes in size.

1991st. Veteran drinks soda with syrup. Someone had already scratched the Depeche Moda logo on the middle machine. Glasses were always shared. You come up, wash it in the machine itself, then put it under the nozzle. Fastidious aesthetes carried folding glasses with them, which had the peculiarity of folding in the process. The photo is good because all the details are characteristic and recognizable. And a payphone half-box, and a Zaporozhets headlight.

Until 1991, American photographers followed the same routes. Almost every photo can be identified - this is on Tverskaya, this is on Herzen, this is near the Bolshoi Theater, this is from the Moscow Hotel. And then everything became possible.

Recent history.

1992 near Kyiv. This is no longer the USSR, just by the way I had to. A dude poses for an American photographer, voting with a bottle of vodka to trade it for gasoline. It seems to me that the photographer himself issued the bottles. However, a bottle of vodka has long been a kind of currency. But in the mid-nineties, all plumbers suddenly stopped taking bottles as payment, because there were no fools left - vodka is sold everywhere, and you know how much it costs. So everything has gone to the money. Today, a bottle is given only to a doctor and a teacher, and even then with cognac.

With food in the late USSR, everything was pretty bad. The chance to buy something tasty in a regular store was close to zero. Queues lined up for tasty treats. Delicious food could be given "in order" - there was a whole system of "order tables", which were actually centers for the distribution of goods for their own. In the order table, he could count on tasty things: a veteran (moderately), a writer (not bad), a party worker (also not bad).

Residents of closed cities in general, by Soviet standards, rolled around like cheese in butter in Christ's bosom. But they were very bored in the cities and they were restricted to travel abroad. However, almost all of them were restricted to travel abroad.

Life was good for those who could be of some help. Let's say the director of the Wanda store was a very respected person. Super VIP by recent standards. And the butcher was respected. And the head of the department in Detsky Mir was respected. And even a cashier at the Leningradsky railway station. All of them could "get" something. Acquaintance with them was called "connections" and "ties". The director of the grocery was reasonably confident that his children would go to a good university.

1975 year. Bakery. I felt that the cuts on the loaves were made by hand (now the robot is already sawing).

1975 year. Sheremetyevo-1. Here, by the way, not much has changed. In the cafe you could find chocolate, beer, sausages with peas. Sandwiches did not exist, there could be a sandwich, which was a piece of white bread, at one end of which there was a spoonful of red caviar, and at the other - one round of butter, which everyone pushed and trampled under the caviar with a fork as best they could.

Bread shops were of two types. The first one is with a counter. Behind the saleswoman, there were loaves and loaves in containers. The freshness of bread was determined in the process of questioning those who had already bought bread or in a dialogue with the saleswoman:

- For 25 a fresh loaf?

— Normal.

Or, if the buyer did not cause rejection:

- Delivered at night.

The second type of bakery is self-service. Here, loaders rolled up containers to special openings, on the other side of which there was a trading floor. There were no saleswomen, only cashiers. It was cool because you could poke the bread with your finger. Of course, it was not allowed to touch the bread; for this, special forks or spoons were hung on uneven ropes. The spoons were still back and forth, and it was unrealistic to determine the freshness with a fork. Therefore, each took a hypocritical device in his hands and gently turned his finger to check in the usual way how well it was pressed. It's not clear through the spoon.

Fortunately, there was no individual packaging of bread.

Better a loaf that someone gently touched with a finger than tasteless gutta-percha. Yes, and it was always possible, after checking the softness with your hands, to take a loaf from the back row, which no one had yet reached.

1991st. Soon there will be consumer protection, which, together with care, will kill the taste. Halves and quarters were prepared from the technical side. Sometimes it was even possible to persuade to cut off half of the white:

Who will buy the second one? - asked the buyer from the back room.

No one gave packages at the checkout either - everyone came with his own. Or with a string bag. Or so, carried in the hands.

The grandmother is holding bags of kefir and milk (1990). Then there was no Tetrapac yet, there was some kind of Elopak. On the package was written “Elopak. Patented." The blue triangle indicates the side from which the bag must be opened. When we first purchased the packaging line, it came with a barrel of the right glue. I found those times when the package opened in the right place without torment. Then the glue ran out, it was necessary to open it from two sides, and then fold one side back. The blue triangles remained, but since then no one has bought glue, there are few idiots.

By the way, at that time there was no additional information on the product packaging - neither the address nor the phone number of the manufacturer. Only GOST. And there were no brands. Milk was called milk, but differed in fat content. My favorite is in the red bag, five percent.

Dairy products were also sold in bottles. The contents differed in the color of the foil: milk - silver, acidophilus - blue, kefir - green, fermented baked milk - raspberry, etc.

Joyful queue for eggs. There could still be Krestyanskoye oil on the refrigerated display case - it was cut with wire, then with a knife into smaller pieces, wrapped immediately in oil paper. In the queue, everyone stands with checks - before that, they stood in line at the cashier. The saleswoman had to be told what to give, she looked at the figure, counted everything in her head or on the accounts, and if it converged, she gave out the purchase (“let go”). The check was strung on a needle (it stands on the left side of the counter).

In theory, they were obliged to sell even one egg. But buying one egg was considered a terrible insult to the saleswoman - she could yell at the buyer in response.

Those who took three dozen were given a cardboard pallet without question. Whoever took a dozen was not supposed to have a pallet, he put everything in a bag (there were also special wire cages for aesthetes).

This is a cool photo (1991), here you can see video rental cassettes in the background.

Good meat could be obtained through an acquaintance or bought in the market. But everything in the market was twice as expensive as in the store, so not everyone went there. "Market meat" or "market potatoes" is the highest praise for products.

Soviet chicken was considered to be of poor quality. Here is the Hungarian chicken - it's cool, but it has always been in short supply. The word "cool" was not yet in wide use (that is, it was, but in relation to the rocks)

Until 1990, it was impossible to imagine that a foreign photojournalist would be allowed to shoot in a Soviet store (especially on the other side of the counter). Everything became possible in 1990.

Outdoors at the same time, the color of the meat was more natural.

There are two chickens on the counter - imported and Soviet. Import says:

- Look at you, all blue, not plucked, skinny!

“But I died a natural death.

The USSR was a multinational country with the proclaimed principle of friendship among peoples. And this friendship was not always just a declaration. Otherwise, in a country inhabited by more than 100 different nations and nationalities, it was impossible. The equality of all peoples in the formal absence of a titular nation - this is the basis for the propaganda myth about "a single historical community - the Soviet people."
Nevertheless, all representatives of a single historical community were required to have passports, in which there was the notorious “fifth column” to indicate the citizen’s nationality in the document. How was nationality determined in the USSR?

According to the passport

Passportization of the country's population began in the early 1930s and ended shortly before the war. Each passport necessarily indicated the social status, place of residence (registration) and nationality. Moreover, then, before the war, according to the secret order of the NKVD, nationality was to be determined not by self-determination of a citizen, but based on the origin of the parents. The police had instructions to check all cases of discrepancy between the surname and the nationality declared by the citizen. Statisticians and ethnographers compiled a list of 200 nationalities, and when receiving a passport, a person received one of the nationalities from this list. It was on the basis of these very passport data that mass deportations of peoples were carried out in the 1930s and later. According to the estimates of historians, representatives of 10 nationalities were subjected to total deportation in the USSR: Koreans, Germans, Ingrian Finns, Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks. In addition, there was an implicit, but quite obvious anti-Semitism, and the practice of repression against representatives of other peoples, such as Poles, Kurds, Turks, etc. Since 1974, the nationality in the passport was indicated on the basis of the application of the person himself. Then there were jokes like this: “Papa is Armenian, mother is Jewish, who will be their son? Of course, Russian! However, in most cases, nationality was still indicated by one of the parents.

By mom and dad

In the vast majority of cases, a citizen determined his nationality by the nationality of his father. In the USSR, patriarchal traditions were quite strong, according to which the father determined both the surname and the nationality of the child. However, there were other options as well. For example, many, if they had to choose between "Jew" and "Russian", chose "Russian", even if their mother was Russian. This was done because the “fifth column” made it possible for officials to discriminate against representatives of some national minorities, including Jews. However, after the Jews were allowed to leave for Israel in 1968, the opposite situation was sometimes observed. Some Russians looked for a Jew among their relatives, and made incredible efforts to change the inscription in the "fifth column". Nationalities and during this period of free national self-identification were determined according to the lists of officially recognized peoples living in the USSR. In 1959, there were 126 names on the list, in 1979 - 123, and in 1989 - 128. At the same time, some peoples, for example, the Assyrians, were not on these lists, while in the USSR there were people who defined their nationality in this way .

By face

There is a sad anecdote about a Jewish pogrom. They beat a Jew, and the neighbors told him: “How is it, you bought yourself a passport, with the “fifth column” where Russian is written!”. To which he sadly replies: “Yes, but they beat me not by my passport, but by my face!” Actually, this anecdote quite accurately illustrates the situation in law enforcement agencies, where they taught to determine nationality in this way: not by a passport, but by a face . And if, in general, it is easy to distinguish a gypsy from a Yakut, then it will be somewhat more difficult to understand where the Yakuts and where the Buryats are. But how to understand where is Russian, and where is Latvian or Belarusian? There were whole tables with ethnic types of faces that allowed policemen, KGB officers and other structures to accurately distinguish people "not by passport." Of course, this required a good memory for faces and observation, but who said that it would be easy to understand the nationality of people in a country where more than 100 peoples live?

At the behest of the heart

The Fifth Column was abolished in 1991. Now, in the passport and in other documents, nationality is not indicated or indicated in special inserts, only at will. And now there are no lists of nationalities from which a citizen must choose either. The removal of restrictions on national self-identification led to an interesting result. During the 2010 census, some citizens indicated their belonging to such peoples as "Cossack", "Pomor", "Scythian" and even "elf".

Nomenclature. The ruling class of the Soviet Union Voslensky Mikhail Sergeevich

1. Is there Soviet power in the Soviet Union?

It seems inconvenient even to ask such a question: what other power can there be in the Soviet state? It’s bad or good, but the power is Soviet! Let us, nevertheless, for the sake of scientific thoroughness, verify this statement.

What is Soviet power? Any power in a state called the Soviet Union? No. Soviet power is a certain form of power, the concept of which has been carefully developed.

According to the expression adopted in the USSR, Lenin discovered the Soviets as a state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Although there was no dictatorship of the proletariat, this expression still has a certain meaning: the Soviets really arose, and Lenin really drew attention to them as a form of state power. Before the 1905 revolution in Russia, Lenin, like all the Bolsheviks, following Marx and Engels, believed that in the period from socialist revolution to communist society there would be a state like the Paris Commune of 1871. When, in 1905, in revolutionary Russia, not according to the plan of any party, but spontaneously, Soviets began to be created, Lenin saw in them the form of such a state born of historical regularity. The power of the Soviets, wrote Lenin, is "the power the same type what was the Paris Commune of 1871. The main features of this type, Lenin continues, are 1) the source of power is not the law, previously discussed and carried out by the parliament, but the direct initiative of the masses of the people from below and in the localities ... 2) the replacement of the police and the army, as institutions separated from the people and opposed to the people, direct armament of the whole people; state order under such power is protected themselves armed workers and peasants, myself armed people; 3) the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy, are either replaced again by the direct power of the people themselves, or at least placed under special control, turning not only into elected officials, but also into replaceable at the first request of the people, they are reduced to the position of simple representatives; from a privileged stratum with high, bourgeois pay "townships" are transformed into workers of a special "type of weapon", paid not higher the normal board of a good worker.

In this and only in that essence the Paris Commune as a special type of state.

Well, it looks like the Soviet state?

Something doesn't look like it. More precisely, the Soviet Union, more than any other existing state, is the exact opposite of what Lenin wrote. Moreover, this is the opposite in all the points he named: 1) the people in the USSR are completely subordinate to orders from above; 2) in the country - a huge army and police, the people are stricter disarmed; 3) the political bureaucracy - not even just a privileged stratum with bourgeois pay, but a ruling, exploitative and privileged class with feudal gaits.

But these signs, according to Lenin, main for a state like the Paris Commune, that is, for Soviet power, in them and only they are the essence this power. So how is it: is there Soviet power in the Soviet Union?

Here we are again back to this question, but now it seems to be less strange.

Was any theory created in Soviet times regarding the nature and characteristics of Soviet power?

There was, although, of course, the question of the discrepancies between Lenin's words and the reality of the Soviet state was not touched upon.

The discourses of Soviet statesmen, published over the first two decades after October 1917, formed a coherent and even interesting-sounding theory of the Soviets as a special form of state power allegedly inherent precisely in the dictatorship of the proletariat. While the bourgeois state is based on the progressive for its time, but now hopelessly outdated idea of ​​the separation of powers, this theory broadcasts, the Soviets are at all levels the single organs of proletarian power, both legislative and executive. Even local Soviets are not municipalities, but bodies of state power, and all together the Soviets, from top to bottom, constitute a single system of homogeneous links of different scales. Such a system is immeasurably more democratic than any parliament with the farce of bourgeois elections, it represents true progress.

As soon as these fiery words had hardened into an established theory, the 1936 Constitution was adopted in the USSR. The Stalinist Constitution of victorious socialism, as it was called, crossed out the arguments of theoreticians with a bold line. The notorious unity of the system was torn into several parts: into higher and local bodies of state power and into the same bodies of state administration. Local bodies - the Soviets and their executive committees - turned out to be ordinary municipalities, the "highest bodies of state power" - the Supreme Soviets - legislative (more precisely, legislative), and the "highest bodies of state administration" - the Councils of Ministers - executive bodies.

The Supreme Soviets began to proudly be called "Soviet parliaments", although, it is true, they did not deserve such a name. This was done despite the fact that Lenin loudly mocked "parliamentary cretinism" and the word "parliament" was a pejorative term in the USSR for a long time.

The parliamentary masquerade went even further. They tried to disguise the absence of any parties in the elections, except for the ruling one, with the term "bloc of communists and non-party people." It is assumed that this bloc, formed by no one knows who and when, nominates candidates - in a strange proportion, inverse to the numerical ratio of the bloc's members.

The Brezhnev Constitution of "developed socialism" did not change anything in such a power structure either. On the pages of Pravda, theorists of Soviet law continued to talk about a "single system of organs of people's power." But they immediately reported: in it there are “Soviets of the Union and Autonomous Republics as relatively independent subsystems”, and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in general plays “a special role in the leadership of all the Soviets of the country”; as a task, an even "more clear, concrete division of labor between the various links of the system of Soviets" is put forward.

What is the result - a parliamentary system? Of course not. But not Soviet power either. Not one of its most important characteristics has been preserved: there is no single system, there is a clear separation of powers. Only one word "soviet" remained from Soviet power in the USSR.

But this word is used in the state systems of many countries. The Council of Ministers is the usual name for governments. So, in France, the head of government has long been called the chairman of the council. The word "council" is used in parliaments: the Bundesrat - the Federal Council in Germany, the National Council and the Federal Council in Austria. Everywhere in Europe there are city, communal and other local councils. The name State Council, which became a political fashion in Eastern Europe, was also not new: there was such a council in Tsarist Russia, and in pre-war Germany Adenauer was the chairman of the Prussian State Council. But there was not and is not in all these countries of Soviet power!

There is none in the Soviet Union either.

For those readers who are still ready to be indignant that we suddenly reject the usual thesis about the existence of Soviet power in the USSR, we will propose to answer the following question: “What would the leaders of the nomenklatura class themselves have to say about state power in the USSR if they were consistent? ?

Let's reason. The power of the Soviets is the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the USSR, according to the Program of the CPSU, there is a society of developed socialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat no longer exists. So how can the power of the Soviets remain? What is form without content?

Marxism does not allow this. The power of the Soviets, like the dictatorship of the proletariat and together with it, also fulfilled its historical mission and ceased to exist, passing into a new form corresponding to the current character of power as a nationwide one. All this, word for word, could be included in the report at the CPSU congress.

Thus, when we say that there is no Soviet power in the Soviet Union, we are only asserting what the nomenklatura ideologists themselves would have to say - if they took seriously their own arguments about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the nation-wide state that replaced it. But that's exactly what they don't do. They understand that all this is fiction! And since the idea that Soviet the state, of course, Soviet power has become familiar, ideologists use this and go on talking about Soviet power in the USSR.

"Soviet power" is the slogan of the revolutionary years, which later turned into a petrified verbal fetish. In fact, during the revolutionary years, the Bolshevik leadership believed that it was possible to do without Soviet power. The Bolshevik slogan "All power to the Soviets!" firmly entered the history of 1917. But this slogan was dropped by Lenin after the July days of 1917, when it became clear that the Soviets did not intend to support the Bolshevik Party. It was restored only after the Bolsheviks took over the Soviets in the autumn of 1917 (“Bolshevization of the Soviets”). This means that it was not the Soviets as such, but only the Soviets as organs of the Bolshevik dictatorship that interested Lenin.

Maybe everything changed under Gorbachev? No, and this is directly recognized in his promises to transfer power to the Soviets. This means that they still do not have this power - more than 70 years after the victory of the Bolsheviks under the slogan "All power to the Soviets!"

This fact very clearly shows that the power of the Soviets and the power of the Bolsheviks are by no means identical. Councils are just the most simple and logical, and therefore spontaneously emerging form of self-government in all cases, When state power is suddenly swept away. Therefore, the Soviets are also anti-communist. Thus, workers' councils were spontaneously created during the revolution in Hungary in October 1956, during the revolutionary events in Poland in December 1970. During the days of the uprising in Novocherkassk in June 1962, a council arose in the city, not a government one, but a new, insurgent one.

In the Soviet Union, power is not Soviet, but nomenklatura. This is a dictatorship, but not of the proletariat, but of the nomenklatura class.

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