Ideas and Ideals

This article is dedicated to Bulgarian Bogomils’ ideology research. Bogomilism is one of the most popular and influential Christian heresies, appeared in mediaeval Bulgaria in 10^th century. Ideology, interpreted in terms of Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes as a structured sign-expressed world image, is divided into different levels. There are the Bogomils’ ideas of politics, economy, corporeality and mysticism. Bulgarian heretics’ world-view was based on religious dualism – a concept of existence of opposite fundamentals (spiritual and material in that case), with a human as their battlefield. Negation of everything material, based on religious dualism, thereby is Bogomilism’s world-view basis. The Bogomils’ revolutionary character, noted by some scholars, appeared not only in politics (denial of authorities) – this religious movement tended to a social ideal, that supposed a much deeper changes of society (created by Sathan) and human nature. The process of making of this “new human” presents as a consecutive negation of everything, connecting him with material world: from social position, property and family till his own body.

The article poses for the first time the problem of the existence of democratic and undemocratic variants of the Populist model of the reorganization of Russia. The latter, born three times in different historical epochs on the left flank of the party, can be determined by the self-designation of these forces, under the common name - as a Left-Narodnik variant of the Narodnik model of the socio-political reorganization of Russia. It is known in three of his sub-variants - the maximalist (1904-1906), the Left Socialist (1917) and the MPSR (1919-1922). The democratic Socialist-Revolutionary version of the populist model is known in three sub-variants. The most famous is the so-called. "Chernovsky", "centrist", which became a kind of "Socialist-Revolutionary orthodoxy" and formed the basis of the official doctrine of the PSR. Another sub-variant was born on the right flank of the party and is associated with the names of N.D.Avksentyev, I.I.Fondaminsky, V.V.Rudnev, M.V.Vishnyak, and others. Apparently, we can talk about the formation of one more, more right subvariant, which was forming on the right flank of the party around the newspaper "The Will of the People" (Volya Naroda) and is associated with the names of A.A.Argunov, A.I.Gukovsky, P.A.Sorokin, E.A.Stalinsky. They were ideologically close to E.K.Breško-Breshkovskaya, A.F.Kerensky, B.V.Savinkov, and others. The author believes that, in fact, the democratically oriented part of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party anticipated the ideas and path of the so-called "Swedish socialism," the path of evolutionary reforming of society along the lines of democracy and the social state, a path which was taken by many socialist and social democratic parties in post-war Europe. In Russia, the PSR took this path already in 1917 and it was this program of its transformation that was supported by the majority of the population of Russia at the elections to the Constituent Assembly. Moreover, the Socialist-Revolutionary democratic alternative started to be implemented in the framework of the laws adopted by the Constituent Assembly

Justice as a theme and a subject of research is, in fact, a cluster of concepts, which organize a specific multi-actant historical process. It deals with certain forms of human self-understanding and methods of turning less equitable social relations into more equitable ones. One of the basic problems here is to clarify and to explicate existing forms of understanding of Justice, and then to organize a communicative space for an ongoing process of discussions on the national and even transnational level. While doing so the social life might have been reorganized in the mode of strengthening respect to the competing ideas of Justice, which are revealed as the result of those discussions. On the other hand, Truth within social sciences could be understood as a matrix of openness of the world-as-a-whole, i.e. as a sort of collective optics which allows to identify things as things, facts as facts, events as events, and, therefore, generates collective forms of in-the-world orientation, common for a given nation, or a given historical moment, etc. But altogether this produces deep conflicts between scientific knowledge and “folk” estimates of social and historical reality because historical and social “facts” themselves are still not defined.

The article analyzes the implementation of the control by the Party Control Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) over the political behavior of the Communists in the postwar period. The moral resistance of the members of the ruling party to the authorities’ policy is one of the brightest phenomena of the Soviet era. Documents of the Party Control Commission mostly consist of decisions on appeals of the punished Communists, which allow us to see the characteristic manifestations of dissent from both ordinary party members and the officials. These people denied the brutality of the regime and the limitation of themes available for criticizing. The PCC (the Party Control Commission) brought to justice those responsible for violations of party discipline and ethics. The dissent and perseverance in defending their views were considered to be particularly serious violations of party discipline. The article shows numerous examples of frequent disagreements with the official policy of the backbone of the Communist party: the officials, the old Bolsheviks, army officers, security officers, propagandists. The party punishment was often followed by the charge of a crime. It is obvious that in conditions of terror, the party members tried to hide their views. That’s why the information about different forms of open protest during the period of late Stalinism becomes more valuable, when the numerous controlling structures carefully suppressed intra-party dissent.

The paper deals with the practical and theoretical implications that justice becomes a real factor in achieving solidarity in the social life of social actors. The different conceptions of justice, revealed their intrinsic and structural differences. The authors conclude that the outcome of the discussions around the theme of justice, continuing the last thirty years, has become a significant semantic shift in the understanding of justice that resulted, in turn, the emergence of new forms and methods of achieving it. It is noted that justice has properties which do not have the truth, and that helps her to stay in the field of philosophy and social sciences, despite the failure of attempts to give her a satisfactory explanation. This property is a special sensitivity towards her by individuals, as well as social and cultural groups. Levels of justice, it was found that the social structure is the foundation of justice. The authors criticize emotivism asserting the impossibility of rational justification of social values, and contrast it justice concept fleksibelnoy methodological basis of which is the idea of transversal reason.