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Constant attempts since 1917 to make the new name stick ("Don't say Russia, say the Soviet Union or U.S.S.R.") have been fruitless. Popular wisdom never accepted the word "Soviet," but went on saying "Russia." This stubbornness now finds justification, as the Soviet Union breaks apart, and no new name is yet agreed. "Russia," "St. Petersburg" and the other "old" names are rushing back with a vengeance. Boris Yeltsin's Russia is the largest and potentially richest country in the world. It has nuclear weapons and is flexing its muscles. Mr. Yeltsin pretends Russia is just an equal among other equal republics. His already frightened neighbors, like mice near an elephant, know better than to believe his reassurances.
"Soviet" was never a bad word in isolation. It means "council" in Russian. The "Councils of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies" were the allegedly democratic bodies that ruled early Communist Russia and its colonies after the revolution. One main revolutionary slogan was Vsya vlast' sovetam (All Power to the Soviets). The "so-" part of Soviet means "together" (and it occurs again in so-yuz for "union" which is a "yoking together"). The "viet" segment of Soviet represents an old Indo-European root for "knowing, knowledge or wisdom." In English, this root appears in "wit" and "wise," and even more pertinently in the name of the old Anglo-Saxon parliament -- the Witena-gemot (a "council gathering of wise people"). So "Soviet" means knowing or debating together in council.
The early Soviet Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote a poem on the "Soviet Passport" in which he tried to instil the pride of patriotism in this strange new nationality. In the early years, before Iosif Stalin clamped down, many Russian communists naively assumed that the world proletariat would rise up to join Soviet Russians in world revolution. Red Army leader Lev Trotsky insisted that revolution in one country alone could not work. Stalin disagreed, insisting that the U.S.S.R. concentrate exclusively on itself. Stalin first exiled Trotsky and then, in 1940, had him killed in Mexico.