IN SEARCH FOR BELARUSIAN DEMOS

Popular in recent times in Belarus motto "The state for people" from political science point of view means that there is quite a clear boundary between the state (power) and people. Yet at the very beginning of his first presidential term, A. Lukashenko answering journalist's question: "What sense do you put into the notion of "democracy", "glasnost", "freedom of speech"?" put it clearly: "People carry out real democracy by choosing the head of the state and legislative power. After this, the head of the state and deputies should act within the limits of the Constitution. That is democracy".

Look, it is not much, and, chiefly, not burdensome. The only thing is to visit one's polling station once in several years and to fulfill the bulletin in a properly and put it into the ballot-box. And then with the feeling of duty performed, you can surely return to your machine-tool, garden and television.

The word "democracy" is usually translated from Greek "rule of people", however, such translating is not exact, so let's follow the philosopher V. Mezhuev: "The Greeks had two words for denoting the notion "people" – demos and ethnos, so don't mix up democracy with rule of ethnos. Demos denotes the Greeks themselves, and other people are ethnos. What is the difference between demos and ethnos? It consists of personally free people. Democracy means the rule of people, in which everybody sees in himself a free citizen, or simply is the power of citizens".

Nowadays the attempts to modernize Greek heritage continue. It is done mainly by means of adding different adjectives. For example, "the sovereign democracy" was invented in the Kremlin, it is translated "independent" (independent of demos, or God forbid, he will self-organize and start to demand) from French.

But a citizen from non-citizen differs, except other things, by the feeling of responsibility for his country and state. Namely, it is the responsibility "for", not "to". The statistics of Table 1 allow us to assess the rate of Belarusian citizenship.

At first sight, the share of citizens in the Belarusian society makes approximately a half, and that is not a few, and it hasn't decreased for the last year, at least. The analysis of dependence of "the level of citizenship" on socio-demographic characteristics depicts that with years the feeling of moral responsibility for governmental actions rises: when 40.1% of respondents in the age group of those younger 30 answer positively the question of Table 1, than in the group of people older than 60 yet 56.7% answer confirmatively. But sex and the level of education don't influence much on distribution of answers. It is worth presupposing, that moral responsibility, about which we are speaking about, is more likely to be proclaimed than to be a manual to real actions. Not accidentally it is higher by people of retirement age.

These findings are supported by statistics of Table 2. Less than a third of respondents agree with the fact that they are able to influence on taking political and socio-economical decisions in our country. In April, 2006 right away of presidential elections the share of "influential" Belarusians increased by 13.5 points. Thus, dynamics marked should be considered as another demonstration of mobilizing effect of election campaign.

The data of Table 3 allow us to get acquainted more closely with "influential" people of Belarus. Here we observe nothing unpredictable. They are our old acquaintances: poorly educated old people trusting A. Lukashenko. They are absolutely right when considering that they are able to influence on taking political and socio-economical decisions in the country. Created during the years of independence in Belarus socio-oriented police state to a large degree attempts to consider mainly the interests of this social group of population.

However, not everything is so pessimistic. The data of Table 4 allow us to assess the growth of public activity for the last nine years. Of course, to reach the American level is very doubtful for the Belarusians, but 11% is 2.3 times more than 4.7% (about 80% of the population in the USA belongs to public organization).

It goes without saying, the growth marked was guaranteed not only by democratically predisposed Belarusians. It is enough to remember PU "Belaya Rus". According to public opinion poll of June, 2.1% of respondents proved their membership in it, and 3.8% became quite mature to join this organization. But 53.2% of people don’t hear about it anything. Yet this is not a problem. Belarusian power is capable "to reach everybody". It has all administrative resources for that.

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