Democratic problems of the soviets

[Gustav HK]

Hello comrades!

I just want to ask you about what you think of the democratic problems in the soviet system in 1917-1918 (i think that after that the soviets degenerated, but let us not discuss this here).

The democratic problems is as follows:

In the soviet constitution of 1918 it states:

25. The All-Russian Congress of Soviets is composed of representatives of urban soviets (one delegate for 25,000 voters), and of representatives of the provincial (gubernia) congresses of soviets (one delegate for 125,000 inhabitants).

This means, that a workers vote was 5 times more important than a peasants vote. Many historians have used it to explain why the bolsheviks got around 52 % of the votes in the 2. All-Russian Soviet Congress, but only around 25 % in the Constituent Assembly.

On the wikipedia article about the Russian Constituent Assembly there is the following information about the soviets:

Two more recent book using material from the opened Soviet achieves, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 by Richard Pipes and A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes, give a different version. Pipes argues that the elections to the Second Congress were not fair, for example one Soviet with 1,500 members sent 5 delegates which was more than Kiev.


So how do you view all these problems?

[Gustav HK]

Anyone?

[Kamerat]

We can view them as undemocratic. Represenative "democracy" is no democracy. Why would we want to elect someone to rule us, when we can do it perfectly fine overselfs through direct democracy. Tho i dont know how easy that would have been in SU at that time with great distances, few phones and no internet, but on local level it would not have been much of a problem. And haveing representatives for each geographic location is always going to be unfair, there will allways be some areas with a lower delegate/inhabitants ratios then other areas. Which would mean that people living in areas with lower delegate/inhabitants ratios would have less power then those living in a areas with high ratios.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

We can take some things from the way the Soviets in Russia operated but they were in no way a perfect model of the way councils SHOULD function in the post-revolutionary society.