Soviet (council)

• 1. Introduction

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  In October 1917, the Second Congress of Soviets declared itself the supreme governing body of Russia. This single act transformed a workers' council into the foundation of a new state. The word "soviet," in Russian, carries meanings ranging from council and assembly to advice and harmony. Those plain definitions barely hint at what soviets actually became. They were local bodies that challenged imperial authority and eventually gave their name to the Soviet Union, officially formed in December 1922. What were they, and where did they come from? How did the same idea surface in Bavaria, in Poland, and across rural China?

• 2. A Word's Roots

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  The Proto-Slavic root *vět-iti, meaning "to inform," is the distant ancestor of the Russian word "soviet." That ancient stem passed into the English word "wise" and into the Latin core of "advisor," a word English acquired through French. Dutch carries the same inheritance in "weten," meaning "to know," and in "wetenschap," the Dutch word for science.

  In Russian, attaching the suffix -nik, which denotes an occupation, to "soviet" produced "sovietnik": councillor. The word "soviet" had long featured in Russian institutional names. The Imperial State Council, which functioned from 1810 to 1917, carried that same word in its Russian title. The closest equivalents in Polish and Ukrainian are both transliterated as "rada," a word drawn from Middle High German.

  The same Slavic root also produced "věst," the word for news. The soviets of 1905 would generate a great deal of it.

• 3. First Councils, 1905

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  In May 1905, according to the official historiography of the Soviet Union, the first workers' council formed in Ivanovo, a town northeast of Moscow. This was the Ivanovsky Soviet. The Russian anarchist Volin, however, claimed in his memoirs that he had witnessed the very beginning of the St Petersburg Soviet in January of that year. This would place the St Petersburg council months ahead of the Ivanovo body in the historical record.

  The Russo-Japanese War, fought from 1904 to 1905, had placed intense strain on Russian industrial production. Workers had been organizing at the turn of the century, largely under government-sponsored trade union leadership. The soviets that emerged in 1905 broke free from that supervision. They spread through the industrial centers of Russia, typically meeting at the factory level. Their primary actors were socialist revolutionaries and anarchists; Lenin's party held only a minority position.

  These soviets organized strikes, led political resistance, and established minor worker cooperatives, though those operations remained modest because of government crackdowns on leftist organizations. The soviets of 1905 dissolved after the revolution was suppressed. They re-emerged a dozen years later under socialist leadership, this time in a Russia locked in a world war and governed by a Provisional Government that was rapidly losing authority.

• 4. Revolution and Dual Power

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  The Socialist Revolutionary Party dominated the new soviets when they first formed after the February Revolution of 1917. Even the Mensheviks held more elected seats than the Bolsheviks at the outset. As World War I continued and Russia suffered defeat after defeat, and as the Provisional Government failed to restore industrial peace, that balance shifted. By degrees, the Bolsheviks came to dominate, rallying workers behind the demand for "all power to the soviets."

  When the Provisional Government was finally overthrown and authority passed to the soviets, John Reed, an American who witnessed the events directly, later wrote that until February 1918 anyone could vote for delegates to the soviets. Reed noted that the bourgeoisie had once been represented in the Petrograd Soviet. A delegate of the Union of Professional Men, comprising doctors, lawyers, and teachers, had sat among its members. This occurred during the period of the Provisional Government.

  Leon Trotsky described the Petrograd experience of November 1917 in his 1920 work Terrorism and Communism. A Town Council had been elected there, Trotsky wrote, "on the basis of the most democratic voting, without limitations for the bourgeoisie." The bourgeois parties boycotted those elections not because they were excluded, he argued, but because they still hoped to end Soviet rule by armed force.

  Vladimir Lenin addressed the question of exclusion in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, published in 1918. He wrote that the disenfranchisement of the bourgeoisie was not a planned feature of proletarian dictatorship. It had not appeared "according to the plan" of any particular party; it had emerged from the struggle itself. The soviets, Lenin noted, had existed without any constitution for more than a year, from the spring of 1917 to the summer of 1918.

  A formal code governing elections to the soviets was adopted in March 1918. Those excluded included employers who used workers for profit, those living on capital income, and private businessmen, agents, and middlemen. Monks and priests of all denominations were also disqualified, as were former police employees, members of the Romanov dynasty, and those deemed lunatics or criminals. With those exclusions codified, the village and factory soviets that remained would form the base of a pyramid structure stretching to the All-Russian Soviet Congress.

• 5. Governing by Council

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  In Moscow during the 1930s, fifteen delegates were recalled by their constituents within a space of four years. This was not an anomaly. Recall was a designed feature of the system. Any delegate who ceased to represent the electorate's views could be removed by a majority vote. The electorate was always present, meeting in factories and villages to discuss politics day by day. This gave each constituency a live and constantly changing public opinion, so the delegate's relationship to those who sent them was direct and ongoing.

  Elections in village and factory soviets were held by a show of hands in open meetings. Any candidate was personally known to the voters, and their qualifications could be debated face to face before the vote was cast. Local constituents compiled lists of what they wanted the government to do, and the elected delegate's role was to carry out those tasks. Very few of those involved were full-time officials. In the 1940s, it was estimated that at any given time more than a million people were participating in the day-to-day running of the soviets.

  Each soviet operated through standing committees that mirrored the government departments above it. Teachers served on education sections; doctors on healthcare sections. By 1985, nearly 2 million deputies were members of at least one standing committee, representing roughly 80 percent of all deputies. These committee members worked alongside unpaid volunteers called the aktiv, people with particular expertise or interest in the issues before the committee.

  The Union Republics, provinces, and town soviets had authority to run their own industries and take censuses. They could hire more doctors, teachers, and nurses, and build schools, libraries, and hospitals. The one constraint was national policy. More than half of each Union Republic's income went toward local grants, and local soviets had wide discretion over how their budgets were spent.

  Over time, the USSR developed its own vocabulary of abbreviated council names. The gorsoviet was a city council; the raysoviet a raion council. The selsoviet served as the rural council, and the possoviet a settlement council. The soviet system was understood at the time as an alternative to parliamentary systems for administering republican governments. Outside Russia, those who tried to build such alternatives found that the form traveled more easily than the conditions needed to sustain it.

• 6. Beyond Russia

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  Kurt Eisner led a bloodless coup in Munich on the 7th of November 1918 with a few hundred men. He occupied the seat of parliament and proclaimed the People's State of Bavaria. Eisner was a popular Jewish writer, described as an eccentric and well-known figure in Munich. He was assassinated three months after his coup. Bavarian workers then established a short-lived soviet republic in the aftermath of his death.

  On the 1st of May 1919, the German Army and local Bavarian Freikorps overthrew the nascent republic. Several hundred people were killed in the process, including many who were not Communist. Political power in Bavaria subsequently passed to the right.

  This upheaval became the political springboard for Adolf Hitler. Hitler had returned to Munich in late November 1918. He developed an intense aversion to the soviet state, which he described at length in Mein Kampf. In that work, he also claimed to have once narrowly avoided arrest by the Bavarian soviet administration. After the republic fell, Hitler began what he called his "first more or less political activity." This involved informing a military commission about those who had participated in the soviet state. This work may have secured him employment with the Reichswehr in Munich as an educational officer. His assigned task was combating communism, pacifism, and democracy among army ranks.

  Polish workers had their own history with councils that predated Bavaria's. During the 1905 Revolution in Congress Poland, workers took control of factories and sometimes entire towns before tsarist forces suppressed the movement. When Poland regained independence in 1918 after 123 years of colonial rule, soviets appeared across the country. Over 100 workers' councils operated there between 1918 and 1919, assembling around 500,000 workers and peasants. The most numerous and radical councils were concentrated in Kraśnik, Lublin, Płock, Warsaw, Zamość, and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie. Some managed to form self-defence units. By July 1919, the Polish government had dismantled most of them, aided by the withdrawal of support from the reformist Polish Socialist Party.

  Workers' councils reappeared in Poland during the years 1944-1947 and during the Poznań protests of 1956. The Polish October of that same year brought another wave. They surfaced again in 1970 and in the strike committees of 1980-1981.

  After the Nanchang uprising, the term was adopted by Chinese Communists who had gained control of parts of the country. In 1931, they declared the Chinese Soviet Republic, China's first communist government. In 1929, Deng Xiaoping had already led a short-lived soviet in Bama County. The Chinese Soviet Republic was dissolved on the 22nd of September 1937, when the Chinese Communist Party issued its manifesto on unity with the Kuomintang. This arrangement was known as the Second United Front.

  The Limerick Soviet was formed in Ireland in 1919, at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. It appeared alongside a number of other soviets across the country. In 1920, the Workers' Dreadnought published "A Constitution for British Soviets." The document was issued in preparation for the launch of the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International). It placed special emphasis on household soviets. The goal was to ensure that mothers and those who organize family life in the community would be adequately represented.

  In post-Communist Russia, the Federation Council of the Russian Federal Assembly still carries its original Russian name, Sovyet Federatsii, untranslated.