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:
“Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others’. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery—more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)