Government of the People, by the People, for the People.
This is a definition of ‘democracy’, but what is ‘democracy’? What, indeed, is meant by ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’?
Perhaps the most apt description would be what Lenin and the Bolsheviks handed to the people with their motto ‘all power to the soviets!’ In principle, this was the most democratic government of all time. Marxist-Leninist theory handed power over directly to the toiling masses, to the ordinary people.
This explains why there was felt to be no need for opposition parties in the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. Some of these countries just had one political party – the Communist Party or whatever the national Marxist-Leninist party was called in that country. Others like the GDR (East Germany) and the CSSR (Czechoslovakia) had a coalition government of many parties, led by the Marxist-Leninist party.


