Institutionalization Of Civil Society: Urban Self-Government In Russia 1917

Abstract

The article reviews the process of emergence of new forms of local self-government during the February bourgeois revolution. The extensive information material of this period shows the modernization of state authorities, which necessarily followed the change in public structure. The history of the of bourgeois society formation and the legitimation of democratic processes, characteristic of this short but important period of national history, were closely connected to the organization of a new type of local government. And, although at the level of the highest political power, the widest rights and freedoms were offered to citizens, they received their first practical embodiment in the implementation of the primary organs of local self-government. The huge range of powers that local authorities were ready to accept for themselves, the difference between both the forms of organization of self-government and their class, national and gender composition are not sufficiently studied in modern scientific literature. Meanwhile, a creative approach to determining both the powers of local authorities and the areas of its application gives a rich material for research and allows to predict with high accuracy the development of similar processes in modern Russia.