ABSTRACT
The notion of mobilized political participation by ordinary citizens in the administration of state affairs has been a key component of Soviet ideology since Lenin. One of the primary means for transforming bourgeois society into communism, political participation has been most often discussed in connection with its ideological cousin, the withering of the state. Lenin's theory on political participation was derived from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which described the class basis of the state apparatus that had been developed to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie. With the adoption of developed socialism into Soviet ideology, the official definition and description of the all-people's state changed very little. Ideologists generally agreed that the all-people's state was a new stage in the development of the Soviet state and not a new type of state, settling the debate of the late 1960s, but otherwise the concept was almost identical to the 1961 Party Program.
