People's Democracy

Origins and Development

People's democracy was devised to explain the character of the new regimes installed in Eastern Europe alongside Soviet military advance in 1944–1945. Early on, the term was used loosely to denote a 'special national path' from capitalism to socialism. Czechoslovakia's Klement Gottwald, Poland's Władysław Gomułka, and Bulgaria's Georgi Dimitrov each stressed their country's 'own road,' envisioning multi-party parliamentary systems under communist leadership. For a time the Soviet leadership gave the term no consistent meaning, and in Czechoslovakia non-communists such as Edvard Beneš used it too.

In March 1947, Soviet economist Eugen Varga's article 'Democracy of a New Type' defined people's democratic states as a 'third type of state': neither proletarian nor bourgeois dictatorship, and he considered a parliamentary democracy under communist leadership a viable system. But as the Cold War hardened, this flexible interpretation receded. At the 5th Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party in December 1948, Dimitrov, after consulting Stalin, declared that the people's democratic and Soviet regimes were 'two forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat,' identical in class character and differing only in organizational form. The Polish unification congress adopted the same formula that month, and other Eastern European parties followed.

Political and Economic Features

People's democratic states retained formal multi-party systems under National Front governments led by the communist party. These fronts included workers', peasants' and petty-bourgeois parties, and in some countries bourgeois parties as well. The dismantling of the old state apparatus was more gradual than in the Soviet Union; some countries (Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria) retained monarchy for a time. Universal suffrage was nominally preserved, but real power concentrated in the communist party and security apparatus.

Economically, nationalization of large-scale industry, banking, transport, and foreign trade proceeded in stages, justified by confiscation of 'fascist and collaborator' property. Land reform followed the 'land to the tiller' principle, breaking up large estates, but full-scale collectivization was deferred until the late 1940s, unlike the Soviet pattern.

Decline and Legacy

By the 1950s, 'people's democracy' had settled into a generic label for all socialist states with multi-party systems, but its theoretical distinctiveness had evaporated. The Revolutions of 1989 swept away these regimes and the concept became historical. The Chinese Communist Party's New Democracy and similar theories developed from the same origins as people's democracy, and the DPRK's 1948 constitution defined the state as a 'people's democracy' transitioning toward socialism. That constitution, however, made no reference to Juche, so Juche cannot be asserted to have derived from people's democracy.