The True Nature of Soviets

[reviscom1]

What, exactly, were the Soviets and how did they develop over time?

I know that they started off as workers' councils and assume that the first tier were based around particular workplaces. I also assume that they had a role in running those workplaces.

Were they, in fact, a practical method of implementing "Common Ownership"

Did they stay the same throughout the History of the USSR? By the end they seemed to have morphed into fairly conventional Western style Parliaments and Local Councils? Is that the case?

Did the local and regional ones have much power?

[Blake's Baby]

In the beginning there were striking workers, strike committees and mass assemblies based on workplaces (and regiments). The soviets (councils) should not be confused with these bodies.

The soviets were organisations that were composed of delegates from these base organisations. They also included delegates from neighbourhoods and loads of other organisations. Basically, people organised themselves into interest groups, chose some delegates and sent them to the soviet where the delegates would try to argue for the interests of the group that sent them.

Not sure what you mean by 'common ownership' here. They were in my estimation a way of the working class implementing 'workers' power' or 'revolutionary dictatorship'.

They certainly didn't stay the same, they were practically dead as an institution by 1921. Whether this was a cause or a symptom of the triumph of the counter-revolution in the Soviet Republic is a matter of political philosophy I suppose.

[Strannik]

Lenin writes in "State and Revolution", if I remember correctly, what the Soviets were supposed to be. They were meant to be both legislative and executive organs of what's now called "direct democracy": planning actions in their regions and executing these themselves, whether they were economic or political actions.
Soviets were supposed to continuously elect/call back representatives to and from regional Soviets, which in turn were meant to elect a Supreme Soviet which outlined goals of the system as a whole. Highest authority in Soviet Union was theoretically Supreme Soviet.
While on paper Supreme Soviet should have delegated common strategic goals and limits to regional soviets and so on, which should then execute them according to local needs and possibilities, practically USSR established a pretty ordinary executive government branch, which ran everything directly. Local Soviets could control economy only through influencing this apparatus on strategic level through several intermediate organs. Factories and farms were handed down detailed production orders from government branch dealing with central planning.
This was at first justified with wartime situation of USSR - extreme poverty, primitive productive forces, ongoing war effort required quick and decisive actions at each case, which required a central commanding force.
By my childhood, Soviets did not held even that power. Factory floor commitee's became conventional labour unions. Delegates could be elected to regional soviets on periodic elections, which elected then the Supreme Soviet, but it was unthinkable that a delegate was not a member of or not approved by Communist Party. Usually there was only one, Party-sponsored delegate to elect.
In practice Soviet Union was run by informal Party hierarchy which commanded the executive branch of the government directly by placing officials to positions of management. Charade of Soviet elections was kept up to rubber-stamp the decisions handed down on each level with "approval of people".
Soviet delegate was not exactly a very prestigious job in USSR; it was like being in "Public Relations" division of a corporation. To advance to a position of authority in later USSR you had to go either through Party (beginning in a youth organization etc), get an assigned job from a relative/friend on a high position or just be a damn good expert in something vitally necessary, usually related to sciences, technology and defence industries.
In the end the people in high places decided that since they control everything anyway, all this direct democracy "Soviet" nonsense is just keeping them from flaunting their wealth in public. According to "will of people" they restored capitalism and claimed the means of production of USSR as their private property. :)

[reviscom1]

Not sure what you mean by 'common ownership' here.


I was working on the theory that (a) the workplace level Soviets managed those workplaces and (b) the higher level Soviets formed the legislative power - a practical means of having the national/regional economy run by the people who worked in it.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I was working on the theory that (a) the workplace level Soviets managed those workplaces and (b) the higher level Soviets formed the legislative power - a practical means of having the national/regional economy run by the people who worked in it.

Unfortunately, that is simply not correct. First of all there were no "workplace soviets". Perhaps you are conflating them with factory committees? Soviets were geographic organs; there was a Soviet in Ivanovno and a Moscow Soviet and the Petrograd Soviet. (By the way, the last one, the most important one, was atypical in its origin - it was the successor to the Menshevik "Patriotic Group" of the imperial Military-Industrial Committee.)

Neither the soviets nor (most of) the factory committees managed enterprises, however. Many enterprises were not nationalised at all; those who were had specially-designated managers that were appointed by agreement between the state (usually through the old imperial organs, the chief and central committees - glavki and tsentry - and later by the main production departments of the VSNKh), factory committees and trade unions, with the state being the most senior partner in this arrangement.


Lenin writes in "State and Revolution", if I remember correctly, what the Soviets were supposed to be. They were meant to be both legislative and executive organs of what's now called "direct democracy": planning actions in their regions and executing these themselves, whether they were economic or political actions.
Soviets were supposed to continuously elect/call back representatives to and from regional Soviets, which in turn were meant to elect a Supreme Soviet which outlined goals of the system as a whole. Highest authority in Soviet Union was theoretically Supreme Soviet.

When Lenin wrote the State and the Revolution, soviets were collaborationist organs run by the Esers and Mensheviks. The State and the Revolution does talk about what would later become known as "the soviet form", but it didn't point to any concrete institutions as embryonic "working organs" of proletarian power. Soviets, trade unions, factory committees - either of these could have been the main organ. The point was to make them working bodies instead of talk shops.

Regional soviets were sporadic (Lenin himself tried his best to get rid of the Union of Communes of the Northern Region, which he thought was playing state while ignoring things like organising the evacuation of Petrograd), and the Congress of Soviets was mostly composed of delegates from the local soviets.

"Direct democracy" wasn't really a thing back then. One shouldn't confuse soviets with dreams about "direct democracy" that are popular today. Furthermore the soviets were never intended to act autonomously.


While on paper Supreme Soviet should have delegated common strategic goals and limits to regional soviets and so on, which should then execute them according to local needs and possibilities, practically USSR established a pretty ordinary executive government branch, which ran everything directly. Local Soviets could control economy only through influencing this apparatus on strategic level through several intermediate organs. Factories and farms were handed down detailed production orders from government branch dealing with central planning.

Well, yes, of course; the problem with Soviet planning was not that it was of too broad a scope but that, due to isolation in one country, it was not broad enough. Do you think an economy can be planned on the level of Ivanovno or Taman?

[Emmett Till]

I was working on the theory that (a) the workplace level Soviets managed those workplaces and (b) the higher level Soviets formed the legislative power - a practical means of having the national/regional economy run by the people who worked in it.

Even at the beginning, the factory committees on the plant floor were different from the local Soviets. Delegates were elected directly to the local soviets, they were not chosen by the factory committees. Which ended up merging with the unions, which actually was often more like reconstituting the unions on a new better basis. The 1921 Workers Opposition wanted the unions not the Soviets to run the economy.

At first indeed the factory committees managed workplaces, they had to, as the managers and the owners were sabotaging production. The factory committees usually saw maintaining and indeed if possible increasing production as their main task, given the extreme economic crisis and the absolute lack of goods for all purposes, especially for trading with the peasants so the workers would not all starve to death.

But it quickly became clear that the only practical way to maintain production was to bring back the old managers, while watching them like a hawk, as the average often illiterate Russian factory worker when stuck with the job of running his (almost invariably his) plant didn't know what to do.

The most skilled, educated and best paid workers, invariably the ones elected to the factory committees, did think they knew how to run their plants, and to some degree they were right, which is why total disaster did not ensure. Somewhat like in America they often looked down on the unskilled, the peasants fresh from the countryside, and the women. A remarkable number of them later got their engineering degrees and became stalwarts of the regime.

By 1921, due to the extreme ravages of the Civil War, a working class six million strong had been reduced to a million and a half due to the best revolutionaries dying in the Civil War or becoming revolutionary state officials, and millions fleeing for food to the countryside to avoid starving to death, where they became the bulwark of Soviet power in the countryside, together with revolutionised peasants in army uniforms.

Absolutely not coincidentally, this is also approximately the number of factory workers promoted into administrative positions during the Stalinist "industrial revolution" of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Usually not directly into factory administration, but after sending them to college first, you had an extreme degree of working class "affirmative action." Various state and party positions most often.

By and large, workers who had not participated in revolution or civil war, had been apolitical or downright anti-revolutionary, and whose main attitude had been self-preservation and keeping their families fed. Just about every worker revolutionary of 1917 by then had either died, retired, been promoted to administrative position, or purged for dissidence. Sometimes instead of but often after a period of participation in government. Historian Robert Davies called the Stalinism of the 1930s the "dictatorship of the ex-proletariat," which is very accurate.

These were the workers who participated in the big wave of strikes of 1921, whose suppression is so often seen as the end of workers rule. In fact, these were pretty much the same people who later as Soviet administrators hailed and participated in the Great Terror, which cleaned out the 1917 revolutionaries and brought the Brezhnevs to the top. I suspect Brezhnev, a former steelworker, was a 1921 striker, something that definitely would have been hidden in his biography. Their hatred of Trotsky went back to 1921, when Trotsky in particular and Jews at the top of the Soviet state apparatus in general were blamed by factory workers for the necessary sacrifices for survival the Soviet state was implementing under "war communism." In recognition of both the will of the workers and of desperate economic necessity, you had Lenin's famous New Economic Policy, a partial return to capitalism hoped to be temporary.

Yezhov, the guy who actually ran the Terror, had supported the Workers Opposition in 1921.

[Strannik]

When Lenin wrote the State and the Revolution, soviets were collaborationist organs run by the Esers and Mensheviks. The State and the Revolution does talk about what would later become known as "the soviet form", but it didn't point to any concrete institutions as embryonic "working organs" of proletarian power. Soviets, trade unions, factory committees - either of these could have been the main organ. The point was to make them working bodies instead of talk shops.

Regional soviets were sporadic (Lenin himself tried his best to get rid of the Union of Communes of the Northern Region, which he thought was playing state while ignoring things like organising the evacuation of Petrograd), and the Congress of Soviets was mostly composed of delegates from the local soviets.

"Direct democracy" wasn't really a thing back then. One shouldn't confuse soviets with dreams about "direct democracy" that are popular today. Furthermore the soviets were never intended to act autonomously.

True, I tried to simplify by calling all organizations of workers power "Soviets". But I think soviets were autonomous by definition - in addition to fulfilling state goals, they could set their local goals and act towards fulfilling them as long as it did not threaten the aims and goals of the soviet state as a whole. That's the definition of autonomy, as opposed to independece.


Well, yes, of course; the problem with Soviet planning was not that it was of too broad a scope but that, due to isolation in one country, it was not broad enough. Do you think an economy can be planned on the level of Ivanovno or Taman?

Broad economic planning is necessarily done at the level of Ivanovo as well. That was the problem with soviet union - it tried to plan on microeconomic level, but without microeconomic information.