8 - Towards a new Russia?

Summary

Gorbachev's resignation as Soviet President appeared to resolve the most important of the dilemmas he had confronted during the last months of communist rule. There was no longer any need to reconcile the competing claims of party power and popular sovereignty as the CPSU was consigned to the ‘dustbin of history’ to which it had tried to send its opponents more than seventy years earlier. The extended search for a ‘socialist market’ was replaced by a commitment to private ownership, even before the USSR itself had been superseded by an association of independent states. And the rights of citizens had no longer to be understood within a context of ‘socialist pluralism’, as first the USSR and then the Russian Federation committed themselves to a wide range of liberal freedoms. The Soviet parliament had already adopted a ‘Declaration of the rights and freedoms of the individual’ in September 1991, which made it clear that the ‘highest value of our Society’ was the ‘freedom of the individual, his honour and worth’. Everyone, under the Declaration, had ‘natural, inalienable and invioable rights and freedoms’, including equality before the law, freedom of speech and assembly and the right to own private property, which was described as the ‘guarantee of the realisation of the interests and freedoms of the individual’.