Soviet democracy (sometimes council democracy) is a form of democracy in which workers' councils called "soviets" (Russian for "council"), consisting of worker-elected delegates, form organs of power possessing both legislative and executive power. The soviets begin at the local level and onto a national parliament-like assembly. According to Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist theorists, the soviets represent the democratic will of the working class and are thus the embodiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Critics of Lenin's rule and Soviet democracy such as the council communists claim that workers' councils/soviets were subverted and not truly sovereign in the Soviet Union. Trotskyists agree that this was the case after Joseph Stalin's takeover, but not completely so during Lenin's time. Maoists and Hoxhaists argue that flaws in the system under Lenin and Joseph Stalin were due to a lack of the party's faith in the masses and that this resulted in the party disconnecting itself to the needs of the people, which was then exploited by Marxist revisionists who turned the Soviet Union away from Marxism-Leninism after Lenin's death.
Read more about Soviet Democracy: Concept, History in The Soviet Union, See Also, References
Famous quotes containing the words soviet and/or democracy:
“The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In Italy, for thirty years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)