№ 4 - 2001
Pivovarov Yu.S., Fursov A.I.
”Russian System” as an Essay of Grasping Russian History

The authors regard Power as the most important and structure-generating element of the Russian political system that had been forming since the 16th century as an alternative to the West’s capitalist system. The Population and the Superfluous Man (individual or collective) appear in their concept as the other two elements of the system. The only socially significant subject of the Russian system, for that matter, has always been, in the authors’ opinion, the Power. The authors note, among its main characteristics, its being of a “mono-subject” nature and its “remoteness”.The main among the reasons that preconditioned its emergence, they maintain, was the influence exerted on Rus by the Tataro-Mongolian inroad and the two hundred years domination of the Horde. Yu.S.Pivovarov and A.I.Fursov put the greatest socio-political collisions of the past five hundred years of Russian history in relation with the redivisions of Power. Each of these redivisions, they contend, meant the rise of a new group “beside the Power” that invariably turned out more numerous and poorer than the previous one. With Communism, the Power was, as it were, washed out all over Russia, the Population turned out, for the first time, to be included into it. The authors come to the conclusion that Communism and its end became the logical result of Russian Power’s self-expansion.