Soviet Democracy - History in The Soviet Union

History in The Soviet Union

The first soviets, also called workers' councils, were formed after the Russian Revolution of 1905. Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw the soviet as the basic organizing unit of society in a communist system and supported this form of democracy. The soviets also played a considerable role in the February and October Revolutions. At that time, they represented a variety of socialist parties in addition to Bolsheviks.

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 a got a minority of the votes in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, he illegally disbanded it by force after its first meeting, arguing, like Karl Marx, that parliamentary democracy 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 democracy did not include those considered bourgeois. Critics argued that the elections to the Soviets were not free and fair, unlike the elections to the Assembly.

After the revolution, the Bolsheviks had to defend the newly formed government in World War I and the Russian Civil War. 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. However, one key blow against soviet democracy occurred when other revolutionary socialist soviets other than Bolshevik soviets were disbanded in a series of coups d'état because workers returned non-Bolshevik majorities as early as March 1918. Lenin argued that the Soviets and the principle of democratic centralism within the Bolshevik party still assured democracy. However, Lenin also issued a "temporary" ban on factions in the Russian Communist Party. This ban remained until the revolutions of 1989 and according to critics made the democratic procedures within the party an empty formality.

When Stalin came to power he consolidated much more authority under the party. Soviets were transformed into the bureaucratic structure that existed for the rest of the history of the Soviet Union and were completely under the control of party officials and the politburo.