POLITICAL REGIMES: THE QUESTION OF THE CONTENT OF THE CONCEPT AND BASES OF CLASSIFICATION
The political regime, as a rule, is understood as a set of methods, means and methods of exercising state power. But the historical practice of state-building shows that the above mentioned suffers from a certain narrowness, does not reflect many of the qualitative characteristics of the political regime as one of the elements of the form of the state. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to establish a complete authentic content of this concept, which would allow a schematic and simplified approach to the typology of political regimes prevailing in the theory of the state, according to which they are all divided into democratic and anti-democratic, and among the latter, authoritarian and totalitarian. In this classification, a democratic regime means only one of its varieties, which it would be more correct to call the liberal-democratic regime and which is characteristic only of modern capitalist states of the West, where the key characteristic is the concept of liberalism, and not democracy. The article substantiates that in order to qualify the political regime in a particular country, at any historical stage of its development, it is necessary to determine: the actual carrier of state supremacy; in the interests of which social classes and strata this carrier carries out power-management activities; and only in the last place, what political and legal forms, methods and techniques prevail in its activities. Only on the basis of such criteria does it become possible to single out a liberal-democratic, totalitarian-democratic, totalitarian-oligarchic, authoritarian-oligarchic, authoritarian-liberal, authoritarian-democratic, oligarchic-liberal, oligarchic-democratic and other regimes, often referred to in individual scientific and publicistic works, but practically ignored by modern jurisprudence. The most extreme opposites among the political regimes are totalitarianism and liberalism, which in their “pure” form practically do not occur. Almost always, political regimes function as certain intermediate states between these two extreme poles, tending to one of them. There can be no absolutely “clean”, unlimited democratic regimes. The people always and everywhere acted and acts as the main object of power, and not its subject. The most important role in the identification of a political regime in a given state is played by the establishment of its social essence, since it is impossible to determine and constitute the optimal mode of functioning of the state mechanism in isolation from the general principles of the structure of society.