«Всею землею Российские державы»: Очерк истории народовластия в России (X–XVII века)

Abstract

The idea of democracy plays one of the leading roles in contemporary Russian political discourse. Still nowadays a lot of Russian people perceive the idea of democracy as something foreign and borrowed, derived from the outside, furthermore even the word “democracy” very often carries negative associations. Each people, country and civilization has the right to independently decide the issue of their political system on the basis of their own specific historical experience and not accept theoretical schemes and models imposed from the outside. Russia has also its own historical experience as the history of Russia and country and civilization runs to more than thousand years. But that doesn’t mean that there were no democratic institutions in the history of Russian people or that there were no democratic practices. What kind of public democratic system can be found in Russian political tradition? The present article is devoted to the study of this question. The author examines democratic traditions in Russia in the 10th–12th centuries. We certainly won’t find the theoretical conception of the term “democracy” in spiritual; and political ideas in Russia of the 10th-12th centuries, as well as any detailed analysis of the history of Russian democratic institutions in the works of Russian thinkers of that time. Still annalistic and other sources contain extensive factual data that can be used by the researchers for the analysis of Slavic and Russian democratic traditions and reconstruction of the democratic conceptions of our ancestry.