A Soviet Republic, a republic ruled by soviets (workers' councils), may refer to one of the following:

Soviets (singular: soviet; Russian: сове́т, Russian pronunciation: [sɐˈvʲɛt], literally "council" in English) were political organizations and governmental bodies, primarily associated with the Russian Revolutions and the history of the Soviet Union, and which gave the name to the latter state.

Etymology

“Soviet” is derived from a Russian word signifying council, assembly, advice, harmony, concord, ultimately deriving from the Proto-Slavic verbal stem of *větiti "to talk, speak". The word "sovietnik" means councillor.

A number of organizations in Russian history were called "council" (Russian: сове́т). For example, in Imperial Russia, the State Council, which functioned from 1810 to 1917, was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905.

Russian Empire

Workers' Councils

According to the official historiography of the Soviet Union, the first worker's council (soviet) was 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. Soviets sprang up throughout the industrial centers of Russia, usually organized at the factory level. The soviets disappeared after the Revolution of 1905, but re-emerged under socialist leadership during the revolutions of 1917.

Soviet democracy (sometimes council democracy) was a political system in the Soviet Union, in which workers' councils called "soviets" (Russian for "council"), consisting of delegates, formed organs of 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. However, the councils were filled by members of the Soviet Communist Party and completely subordinated to its leadership. According to historian Robert Conquest, this political system represented "a set of phantom institutions and arrangements which put a human face on the hideous realities: a model constitution adopted in a worst period of terror and guaranteeing human rights, elections in which there was only one candidate, and in which 99 percent voted; a parliament at which no hand was ever raised in opposition or abstention."