ИСТИНА

From the times of the Communist Manifesto Marxists agreed that the workers revolution would lead to “the conquest of democracy” superior in comparison with the bourgeois democratic order. However, most attention had been paid to the social content of this socialist democracy and its economic tasks. Common and developed vision of its political structures and norms did not exist in Marxist circles. Russian Revolution of 1917 posed this question in concrete practical terms when Bolshevik leaders proclaimed abolition of the “formal democracy” in favor of the “proletarian dictatorship” as a special form of government. Rosa Luxemburg was among those socialists who came out against such rupture with democratic principles. In her polemic with Lenin and Trotsky she developed the conception of basic institutional conditions for the workers and popular self-government in the period of transition to Socialism. At the same time, she put forward the model of the state that would combine structures of Soviet and representative (parliamentary) democracy. The paper analyses her views of socialist democracy’s institutional foundations in the context of development of similar ideas by various other Marxists – from “moderate Bolsheviks” (L. Kamenev, G. Zinoviev) and Left Social Democrats (J. Martov, R. Hilferding, R. Breitscheid) to the leaders of 1956 Revolution in Hungary. The author argues that Rosa Luxemburg’s approaches to democracy could serve as a kind of bridge between Marxism and contemporary political science, represented in particular by works of R. Dahl and Ch. Lindblom.