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)
“Mark the babe
Not long accustomed to this breathing world;
One that hath barely learned to shape a smile,
Though yet irrational of soul, to grasp
With tiny finger—to let fall a tear;
And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves,
To stretch his limbs, bemocking, as might seem,
The outward functions of intelligent man.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)