№ 1 - 2003
Blyakher L.Ye.
Power Games in a Crisis-Stricken Socium: Transformation of the Russian Institutional Structure

The subject of the article is formation of democratic institutions in Russia, investigated as an endogenous Russian innovation. Traditional, “Platonic” approach presupposes, for that matter, deductive postulation of a certain aggregation of attributes of which the presence or the absence, presumably, allows to state, respectively, the presence or the absence of democracy in a given country. Such procedure often leaves out of the investigator’s field of vision real political processes by which the given configuration of political institutions and the given understanding of democracy are being determined. Turning to the analysis of empirical material for the sake of substantiation, the author seeks to demonstrate the political role played by “democratic myth” in the course of the interaction of the power and society in contemporary Russia. It is “presumption of guiltiness” of society towards the power that presents the basis for reinterpreting the function of “classical” democratic institutions in the society in question. The author shows in which way the said “presumption of guiltiness” is being built into the Russian variant of the democratic institutional design, meanwhile determining its structure.