A soviet (, , ) is a representative workers' council that follows a socialist ideology, particularly in the context of the Russian Revolution. In the expanded meaning of "workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils", and later "councils of deputies", the soviets acted as the foundation of the form of government of Russian SFSR and the Soviet Union, and influenced the Makhnovshchina.
The first soviets were established during the 1905 Revolution in the late Russian Empire. In 1917, following the February Revolution, there emerged a state of dual power between the Russian Provisional Government and the soviets. This ended later that year with the October Revolution, during which the Second Congress of Soviets proclaimed itself the supreme governing body of the country.
The governmental bodies on various levels were formally named "", colloquially "soviets of deputies" or "sovdeps". For this reason Soviet Russia or the Soviet Union may be called by the derogatory term "Sovdepiya" ().
Because soviets gave their name to the later Soviet Union, they are frequently associated with the state's establishment. However, the term may also refer to any workers' council that is socialist, such as the Irish soviets. Soviets elsewhere do not inherently need to adhere to the ideology of the Soviet Union.
Etymology "Soviet" is derived from a Russian word meaning council, assembly, advice, harmony, or concord, (rada); ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (Moldovan Cyrillic: совет); ; ; ; ; ; and all ultimately deriving from the Proto-Slavic verbal stem of *vět-iti "to inform", related to the Slavic "věst" ("news"), English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or" (which came to English through French), or the Dutch "weten" ('to know'; cf. "wetenschap" 'science').
The word "sovietnik" means "councillor", from the Russian word "soviet" plus the Russian suffix -ник denoting an occupation.
A number of organizations in Russian were called "council" (). For example, in Imperial Russia, the State Council, which functioned from 1810 to 1917, was referred to as a Council of Ministers.
The Polish and Ukrainian word is respectively and , from Middle High German rāt. See Rada.
Russian Empire
Workers' councils According to the official historiography of the Soviet Union, the first workers' council (soviet) formed in May 1905 in Ivanovo (north-east of Moscow) during the 1905 Russian Revolution (Ivanovsky Soviet). However, in his memoirs, the Russian anarchist Volin claims that he witnessed the beginnings of the St Petersburg Soviet in January 1905. The Russian workers were largely organized at the turn of the 20th century, leading to a government-sponsored trade-union leadership.
In 1905, as the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) increased the strain on Russian industrial production, the workers began to strike and rebel. The soviets represented an autonomous workers' movement, one that broke free from the government's oversight of workers' unions and played a major role in the 1905 Russian Revolution. Soviets sprang up throughout the industrial centers of Russia, usually organizing meetings at the factory level. These soviets disappeared after the revolution of 1905, but re-emerged under socialist leadership during the revolutions of 1917.
Soviets emerged as inclusive bodies to lead workers, and to organize strikes and to politically and militarily fight the government of Russian Empire mainly through direct action, with the primary actors being socialist revolutionaries and anarchists, as Lenin's party was a minority. During this time they established minor worker cooperatives, though the operations were minor due to Russian crackdown on leftist organizations.
Russian Revolution
The popular organizations which came into existence during the February Revolution were called "Councils of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies". These bodies were supposed to hold things together under the provisional government until the election of a constituent assembly could take place; in a sense, they were vigilance committees designed to guard against counter-revolution. The Petrograd Soviet of 4,000 members was the most important of these, on account of its position in the capital and its influence over the garrison.
At the beginning of the Revolution, these soviets were under control of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and even the Mensheviks had a larger share of the elected representatives than the Bolsheviks. As World War I continued and the Russians met defeat after defeat, and the provisional government proved inadequate at establishing industrial peace, the Bolsheviks began to grow in support. By degrees, the Bolsheviks dominated with a leadership which demanded "all power to the soviets."
The Bolsheviks promised the workers a government run by workers' councils to overthrow the bourgeoisie's main government body - the provisional government. In October 1917, the provisional government was overthrown, giving all power to the Soviets. John Reed, an American eyewitness to the October Revolution, wrote, "Until February 1918 anybody could vote for delegates to the Soviets. Even had the bourgeoisie organised and demanded representation in the Soviets, they would have been given it. For example, during the regime of the Provisional Government there was bourgeois representation in the Petrograd Soviet – a delegate of the Union of Professional Men which comprised doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc."
The Bolsheviks and their allies came out with a program called "soviet government". The soviet system was described as "a higher type of state" and "a higher form of democracy" which would "arouse the masses of the exploited toilers to the task of making new history". Furthermore, it offered "to the oppressed toiling masses the opportunity to participate actively in the free construction of a new society". According to Lenin, soviet rule "is nothing else than the organized form of the dictatorship of the proletariat". A code of rules governing elections to the soviets was framed in March 1918, but the following classes were disqualified to vote: "Those who employ others for profit; those who live on incomes not derived from their own workinterest on capital, industrial enterprises or landed property; private business men, agents, middlemen; monks and priests of all denominations; ex-employees of the old police services and members of the Romanov dynasty; lunatics and criminals."
With village and factory soviets as a base, there arose a vast pyramid of district, cantonal, county and regional soviets, each with its executive soviet. Over and above these stood the "All-Russian Soviet Congress", which appointed an "All-Russian Central Executive Committee" of not more than 200 members, which in turn chooses the "Soviet of People's Commissaries"the Ministry. Beginning with a minimum of three and maximum of 50 members for smaller communities, the maximum for town soviets was fixed at 1,000 members. The soviet system was seen as an alternative to parliamentary systems for administering republican governments.
Within the Soviet Union As outlined in the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, and successively the 1924 Constitution of the Soviet Union and 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union, the Soviets were the basis of government in the USSR. Factory and village Soviets would send delegates to town Soviets, and in turn the town Soviet would send delegates to the regional Soviet, town and regional Soviets elected delegates to the provincial Soviet, provincial Soviets sent delegates to the Soviet of the constituent republic, and the Soviets of the Union Republics sent delegates to the Congress of Soviets of the U.S.S.R. As of 1936, the election of delegates up the pyramid became direct with the creation of the Supreme Soviets.
Local constituents within the factory and village soviet would compile a list of what they want the government to do, and the role of the elected delegates was to carry out the given tasks. Unsatisfactory delegates are liable to recall by majority decision of the electorate: in the 30s, fifteen delegates were so recalled within four years in Moscow alone. There were very few full time administrative workers or state functionaries; instead, many citizens would take part in the day-to-day running of the government. In the 1940s, it was estimated that at any given time there were over a million people participating in the running of the Soviets.
Each Soviet has a variety of committees, parallel to the government departments in the USSR as a whole- public employees aided, advised and ran their relevant committees- for example, teachers would be on education sections, and doctors on healthcare sections:
The Union Republics, Provinces and Town Soviets had jurisdiction to run their own industry, take censuses, employ more doctors, teachers, and nurses, build schools, libraries and hospitals so long as it did not directly conflict with the national policy. More than half of the Union Republic's income went towards local grants, and local Soviets were largely allowed to determine how their budget was spent.
Based on the Bolshevik view of the state, the word soviet extended its meaning to any overarching body that obtained the authority of a group of soviets. In this sense, individual soviets became part of a federal structure - Communist government bodies at local level and republic levelEarlier, in the Russian SFSR, there were three levels of soviet hierarchy: local, republic, and federal-republic. were called "soviets", and at the top of the hierarchy, the Congress of Soviets became the nominal core of the Union government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), officially formed in December 1922. Successive Soviet Constitutions recognised the leading role of the Communist Party in politics, - the 1936 Constitution deemed it the "leading nucleus of all organisations of workers, whether public or state". The soviets were structured as the instruments through which the Party governed the country. Thus the organs of the Communist Party (the highest being the Central Committee) made decisions on state policy, while the soviets acted as a system for public approval of implementing the Party's programme.
Later, in the USSR, local-government bodies were named soviet (sovyet: council) with an adjective indicating the administrative level, customarily abbreviated: gorsoviet (gorodskoy sovyet: city council), raysoviet/raisoviet''' (rayonny sovyet: raion council), selsoviet (sel'sky sovyet: rural council), possoviet (poselkovy sovyet: settlement council). In practice deputies in a soviet often worked in standing committees and carried out functions with the help of unpaid volunteers (the aktiv - ).
However, political pluralism disappeared very early. Under Bolshevik rule, rival political parties were suppressed or excluded, and political power became concentrated in the Communist Party. A Cambridge history of Lenin's government notes that Lenin himself came to describe the dictatorship of the proletariat as meaning, “in essence,” the dictatorship of the Communist Party.
Furthermore, the existence of elections and recall did not by itself make the soviets democratic in the ordinary competitive sense. By the Stalin period, elections normally did not offer voters a genuine choice among competing political programmes. This is particularly striking after the supposedly democratic 1936 Constitution. Historian J. Arch Getty notes that the first elections to the Supreme Soviet in 1937 permitted only uncontested candidates, while the constitutional civil liberties and democratic guarantees largely remained dead letters.