In American English, soviet is a noun used to describe a citizen of the former Soviet Union. However, in the context of “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, the term seems to be used as an adjective. In this context, what does soviet mean? How is a “soviet socialist” different than a regular socialist?
Again, the Commies seem to use an adjective as a noun with the word international. Throughout Russia, there are memorials and structures dedicated to the “First International”, “Third International”, “Sixth International” and so on A communist bookstore near me once displayed a sign reading “ALL HAIL THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL!”, or some other ordinal numbered “international”, in the store window. International what?
To expand upon what alphaboi867 said, it’s a description of the form of government. A “soviet socialist republic” is a socialist republic in which administrative power is wielded by soviets (councils).
And the “Internationals” are organisations of socialists and leftists from different countries. There have been a number over time; the First International Workingmen’s Association was founded in 1864 adfter the repressions that followed the European revolts of 1848, for example, and lasted until 1876. it was succeeded in 1889 by the Second International, which lasted until the First World War.
After the First World War, there were a number of international socialist associations, supporting or opposing the new Soviet state and Marxist-Leninism.
One successor to the Second International is the Socialist International, to which a wide variety of democratic socialist parties belong.
A closely related question, if I may piggyback, is why the word совет was left untranslated when the name of the nation was translated into English. Союз was translated as “union”, after all.
Because “soviet” in English became a useful shorthand for a particular type of council–namely, a “council of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies” as used in a Communist country.
Perhaps, by way of analogy, the word sombrero means any hat in Spanish, but has been co-opted in English to mean a particular type of hat popular in Mexico.
The “union”, by contrast, was just like any other union, and we didn’t need a new word for it.
Soviet was also a term used in china to describe areas set up in the 1930’s under control of the Chinese Communist Party. Some of these areas were huge, the size of a province or state.
The Jiangxi Soviet, formally called the Chinese Soviet Republic (Traditional Chinese: 中華蘇維埃共和國; Simplified Chinese: 中华苏维埃共和国; Pinyin: Zhōnghuá Sūwéi’āi Gònghéguó), also translated as the Soviet Republic of China or the China Soviet Republic, existed from 1931 to 1934, as an independent government established by the Communist leader Mao Zedong and his comrade Zhu De in Jiangxi province in southeastern China. It was from this “small state within a state” that Mao gained the experience in guerrilla warfare and peasant organization that he later used to accomplish the Communist conquest of China in the late 1940s. Mao Zedong was the chairman for most of the time.
I don’t understand your question. “Soviet” in this construction describes a type of “socialist republic.” Compare it to “commission-manager municipal government” or “mayor-council municipal government.”
Soviets were workers’ councils formed during the 1905 revolution. Although they were supressed after the revolution, they reappeared after the February 1917 revolution as an alternate government to the liberal democratic official government. In the October 1917 revolution, the Bolshevik-dominated soviets of St. Petersburg ousted the official government. In the Soviet treaty of 1924, the soviets became the legal government of Russia–hence the USSR. Of course, the fact that the Bolsheviks were the only party left in the Soviet made the USSR a de facto one party dictatorship. Still the legal fiction persisted until the the USSR’s fall.