Functions
As an institution, the Sich Rada was a form of direct democracy where rights of individual cossacks were preserved through participation in the Rada.
It was able to decide when to go to war and when to conclude a peace treaty. It elected the officer staff (starshyna), with the Kosh otaman at its head. It received foreign diplomats and determined the course of diplomatic relations.
The Sich Rada also fulfilled certain economic functions, such as the distribution of the communal agricultural and fishing districts among the kurins of the Sich.
Read more about this topic: Sich Rada
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others’ reasons for action, or the basis of others’ emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)