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Concept
Soviet (council)
Summary
Soviets (singular: soviet; sovét, sɐˈvjet, literally "council" in English) were political organizations and governmental bodies of the former Russian Empire, primarily associated with the Russian Revolution, which gave the name to the latter state of the Soviet Union. Soviets were the main form of government in the Russian SFSR, the Makhnovshchina, and to a much lesser extent were active in the Russian Provisional Government. It could also refer to any workers' council that is socialist, such as the Irish soviets. Soviets do not inherently need to adhere to the ideology of the later Soviet Union.
"Soviet" is derived from a Russian word meaning council, assembly, advice, harmony, or concord, 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.
A number of organizations in Russian were called "council" (сове́т).
For example, in Imperial Russia, the State Council, which functioned from 1810 to 1917, was referred to as a Council of Ministers.
The Ukrainian word is рада, from Middle High German rāt. See Rada.
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.
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