Soviet democracy, also called council democracy, is a type of democracy in Marxism, in which the rule of a population is exercised by directly elected soviets (workers' councils). Soviets are directly responsible to their electors and bound by their instructions using a delegate model of representation. Such an imperative mandate is in contrast to a trustee model, in which elected delegates are exclusively responsible to their conscience. Delegates may accordingly be dismissed from their post at any time through recall elections. Soviet democracy forms the basis for the soviet republic system of government. A form of federalist council democracy is commonly supported among anarchist-communists and libertarian socialists, due to its emphasis on bottom-up self-administration.
In a soviet democracy, people are organized in basic units; for example, the workers of a company, the inhabitants of a district, or the soldiers of a barracks. They directly elect delegates as public functionaries, which act as legislators, government, and courts in one. Soviets are elected on several levels; at the residential and business level, delegates are sent through plenary assemblies to a local council which, in turn, delegates members to the next level. This system of delegation (indirect election) continues to a body such as the Congress of Soviets or the Supreme Soviet at the state level. The electoral processes thus take place from the bottom upward. The levels are usually tied to administrative levels. In contrast to earlier democratic models à la John Locke and Montesquieu, no separation of powers exists in soviet democracy.
Under Joseph Stalin, it has been widely argued that the soviets were transformed into undemocratic bodies representing the interests of party bureaucrats rather than the working class.Getty, J. Arch. "State and Society Under Stalin: Constitutions and Elections in the 1930s." *Slavic Review* 50, no. 1 (1991): 19–35. doi:10.2307/2500599.Harris, James. "Stalin and Stalinism." In: Smith, S.A. (ed.), *The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History*. Oxford University Press, 2013. ISBN 9780199236701.Gorlizki, Yoram & Khlevniuk, Oleg. "Stalin and His Circle." In: Suny, Ronald Grigor (ed.), *The Cambridge History of Russia: Volume III, The Twentieth Century*. Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 9780521811446.Library of Congress. "Internal Workings of the Soviet Union – Revelations from the Russian Archives." Library of Congress, Washington D.C., 1992. Available at: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/ However, other historians have argued that the soviet system retained participatory democracy.
Definition Kazuko Kawamoto writes that soviet democracy "may sound odd to many, especially in the younger generation, while to others in the older generation they may bring back memories of the 'good old' Cold War years, when they supported liberal democracy against Soviet socialist democracy, or vice versa. Many Cold War contemporaries thought that there was such a thing as soviet democratic theory, despite not believing the Soviet government's claim of the superiority of soviet democracy over liberal democracy."
The "totalitarian model" of Soviet and communist studies historiography, which was dominant during the Cold War, follows the view that soviet democracy was a farce and that "the Soviet regime was simply oppressive and totalitarian, and not democratic at all." Critics such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Joachim Friedrich often blamed the Soviet regime for "lacking liberty, which undermined the meaning of political participation." Nonetheless, "revisionist school" historians focused on the relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level, representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong. They tended to be interested in social history and to argue that the Communist Party leadership had to adjust to social forces."
Some scholars have had a differing view and attributed the establishment of the one-party system in the Soviet Union to the wartime conditions imposed on the Bolshevik government and others have highlighted the initial attempts to form a coalition government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Specifically, Russian historian Vadim Rogovin wrote that the Bolsheviks made strenuous efforts to preserve the Soviet parties such as the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and other left parties within the bounds of Soviet legality and their participation in the soviets on the condition of abandoning armed struggle against the Bolsheviks.
Kazuko writes that "the Soviet government did encourage the working people to speak out. As numerous studies have shown, Soviet citizens responded by writing letters and visiting government offices to address the authorities, even if there were limits to the realization of their demands and the effectiveness of their entreaties." According to Kazuko, these studies showed that "people demanded to be heard and the authorities responded, however insufficiently, because the ideas of democracy obligated them to do so." The reason why the process leading to the Soviet Constitution of 1936 took so long, about twenty years according to Kazuko, was "deeply rooted in the ideas of Soviet democracy. The Soviet regime was democratic in its own sense of the word and this article gives it a more democratic face than what is usually imagined, especially among Western people. However, the regime's unique democratic character seemed to make it rather difficult to function adequately."
History Paris Commune The Paris Commune in 1871 was described by Karl Marx as workers' councils, which select recall-able delegates to a higher assembly.
In Russia and the Soviet Union
The first soviets, also called workers' councils, were formed after the 1905 Russian Revolution. Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw the soviet as the basic organizing unit of society in a socialist system and supported this form of democracy. The soviets also played a considerable role in the Russian Revolution. At which time, they represented a variety of socialist parties in addition to Bolsheviks.
According to the official Soviet historiography, the first soviet was formed in May 1905 in Ivanovo (north-east of Moscow) during the 1905 Russian Revolution (Ivanovsky Soviet). In his memoirs, the Russian anarchist Volin claims that he witnessed the beginnings of the Saint 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. Soviets sprang up throughout the industrial centers of Russia, usually organized at the factory level. The soviets disappeared after the Revolution of 1905, but re-emerged under socialist leadership during the Russian Revolution. Lenin argued for the destruction of the foundations of the bourgeois state and its replacement with what David Priestland described as an "ultra-democratic" dictatorship of the proletariat based on the Paris Commune's system.
In post-revolutionary Russia local workers' soviets would elect representatives that go on to form regional soviets, which in turn elect representatives that form higher soviets, and so on up to the Congress of Soviets. Later the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union would become the highest legislative body of the entire country. After Lenin's party, the Bolsheviks, only got a minority of the votes in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, he disbanded it by force after its first meeting, citing the refusal of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks to honor the sovereignty of soviet democracy, arguing that a system in which parliamentary democracy was sovereign could not fairly represent the workers since it was in practice dominated by the bourgeoisie, that the proportional representation did not take into account the SR split, and that the soviets (where the Bolsheviks did get a majority) more accurately represented the opinion of the people, which had changed as shown in the elections to the soviets between the time of the elections to the Assembly and the first meeting of the Assembly. He also explicitly stated that soviet democracy did not include those considered bourgeois due to the "unscrupulous, self-seeking and sordid fight, the bourgeoisie waged against the Soviets; and...the overt participation of the bourgeoisie in the Kornilov mutiny [an attempted coup]—all this paved the way for the formal exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the Soviets.
The October Revolution was carried out by the soviets under the leadership of the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The latter would leave the government because they opposed the Brest-Litovsk peace agreement. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks had to defend the newly formed government in World War I and the Russian Civil War. According to some critics, many of the effects of the wars on the new Soviet government may be part of what led to the decline of soviet democracy in Russia (due to the authority the state took on in war time) and to the emergence of the bureaucratic structure that maintained much control throughout the history of the Soviet Union. Some believe that one key blow against soviet democracy occurred as early as March 1918, when all nineteen city soviets that were elected during the spring were disbanded in a series of Bolshevik coups d'état because workers returned Menshevik-SR majorities, or non-Bolshevik socialist majorities.