Noun

soviet (plural soviets)

1. A form of governing council in the former Soviet Union.
   • 2005: James Meek, The People's Act of Love (Canongate 2006, p. 230)

     Kratochvil, Jedlicka, Safar, Kubes and Vasata, who always took an interest in politics, set up a soviet in the last wagon and uncoupled it from the rest of the train in the night.

2. The main form of communist government at all levels in the Soviet Union imposed in the bolshevik October Revolution in the former imperial Russia.

Related terms

• Soviet Republic
• Supreme Soviet

Assigned on September 19, 1990, existing onwards. The governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania view themselves as continuous and unrelated to the respective Soviet republics. Russia views the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian SSRs as legal constituent republics of the USSR and predecessors of the modern Baltic states. The Government of the United States and a number of other countries did not recognize the invasion of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in the USSR as legal inclusion.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, Russian: Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik IPA: [sɐˈjus sɐˈvʲeʦkʲɪx səʦɨəlʲɪˈstʲiʨɪskʲɪx rʲɪsˈpublʲɪk] ( listen), abbreviated СССР, SSSR), informally known as the Soviet Union (Russian: Советский Союз, tr. Sovetsky Soyuz) or Soviet Russia, was a constitutionally socialist state that existed on the territory of most of the former Russian Empire in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991.

The Soviet Union had a single-party political system dominated by the Communist Party. Although the USSR was nominally a union of Soviet republics (of which there were 15 after 1956) with the capital in Moscow, it was in actuality a highly centralized state with a planned economy. Much of Soviet society was overseen by national security agencies such as the KGB (which was active from 1954.)

The Soviet Union was founded in December 1922 when the Russian SFSR, which formed during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and emerged victorious in the ensuing Russian Civil War, unified with the Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs. After the death of Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet leader, power was eventually consolidated by Joseph Stalin, who led the country through a large-scale industrialization with command economy and political repression. During World War II, in June 1941, the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany, a country it had signed a non-aggression pact with. After four years of warfare, the Soviet Union emerged as one of the world's two superpowers, extending its influence into much of Eastern Europe and beyond.

The Soviet Union and its satellites from the Eastern Bloc were one of two participating factions in the Cold War, a global ideological and political struggle against the United States and its allies; the Soviet bloc ultimately lost, however, having been hit by economic standstill and both domestic and foreign political unrest, an event which marks the beginning of the post-war period. In the late 1980s the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the state with his policies of perestroika and glasnost, but the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed and was formally dissolved in December 1991 after the abortive August coup attempt. Since then the Russian Federation has been exercising its rights and fulfilling its obligations.