A number of the short-lived socialist states that formed during World War I and its aftermath called themselves people's republics. Many of these sprang up in the territory of the former Russian Empire, which had collapsed in 1917 as a result of the Russian Revolution. Decades later, following the Allied victory in World War II, the name "people's republic" was adopted by some of the newly established Marxist–Leninist states, mainly within the Soviet Union's Eastern Bloc.
The collapse of the European empires during and following World War I resulted in the creation of a number of short-lived non-Marxist–Leninist people's republics during the revolutions of 1917–1923. In many cases, these governments were unrecognised and often had Marxist–Leninist rivals.
Many of these countries also called themselves socialist states in their constitutions. During the 1960s, Romania and Yugoslavia ceased to use the term people's in their official names, replacing it with the term socialist as a mark of their ongoing political development. Czechoslovakia also added the term socialist into its name during this period. It had become a people's republic in 1948, but the country had not used that term in its official name.[30] Albania used both terms in its official name from 1976 to 1991.[31] In the West, these countries are often referred to as communist states. However, none of them described themselves in that way, as they regarded communism as a level of political development that they had not yet reached.[32][33][34][35] Terms used by communist states include national-democratic, people's democratic, socialist-oriented and workers and peasants' states.[36] The communist parties in these countries often governed in coalition with other progressive parties.[37]
^The Arabic word translated as republic is Jamahiriya, a neologism widely interpreted to mean "state of the masses".
^Although the government's official ideology is now the Juche part of the Kimilsungism–Kimjongilism policy of Kim Il Sung as opposed to orthodox Marxism–Leninism, it is still considered a socialist state. In 1992, all references to Marxism–Leninism in the Constitution of North Korea were dropped and replaced with Juche.[53] In 2009, the constitution was quietly amended so that not only did it remove all Marxist–Leninist references present in the first draft, but it also dropped all reference to communism.[54] However, according to North Korea: A Country Study by Robert L. Worden, Marxism–Leninism was abandoned immediately after the start of de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union and it has been totally replaced by Juche from at least 1974 onwards.[55]
References
^"People's Republic". Oxford Dictionaries. Archived from the original on December 30, 2019. Retrieved 2 January 2020. [People's Republic –] Used in the official title of several present or former communist or left-wing states.
^Müller-Rommel, Ferdinand; Mansfeldová, Zdenka (2001). "Chapter 5: Czech Republic". In Blondel, Jean; Müller-Rommel, Ferdinand (eds.). Cabinets in Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 62. doi:10.1057/9781403905215_6. ISBN978-1-349-41148-1.
^Wilczynski, J. (2008). The Economics of Socialism after World War Two: 1945-1990. Aldine Transaction. p. 21. ISBN978-0202362281. Contrary to Western usage, these countries describe themselves as 'Socialist' (not 'Communist'). The second stage (Marx's 'higher phase'), or 'Communism' is to be marked by an age of plenty, distribution according to needs (not work), the absence of money and the market mechanism, the disappearance of the last vestiges of capitalism and the ultimate 'whithering away' of the State.
^Steele, David Ramsay (September 1999). From Marx to Mises: Post Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation. Open Court. p. 45. ISBN978-0875484495. Among Western journalists the term 'Communist' came to refer exclusively to regimes and movements associated with the Communist International and its offspring: regimes which insisted that they were not communist but socialist, and movements which were barely communist in any sense at all.
^Rosser, Mariana V. and J Barkley Jr. (23 July 2003). Comparative Economics in a Transforming World Economy. MIT Press. pp. 14. ISBN978-0262182348. Ironically, the ideological father of communism, Karl Marx, claimed that communism entailed the withering away of the state. The dictatorship of the proletariat was to be a strictly temporary phenomenon. Well aware of this, the Soviet Communists never claimed to have achieved communism, always labeling their own system socialist rather than communist and viewing their system as in transition to communism.
^Williams, Raymond (1983). "Socialism". Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (revised ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 289. ISBN978-0-19-520469-8. The decisive distinction between socialist and communist, as in one sense these terms are now ordinarily used, came with the renaming, in 1918, of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) as the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). From that time on, a distinction of socialist from communist, often with supporting definitions such as social democrat or democratic socialist, became widely current, although it is significant that all communist parties, in line with earlier usage, continued to describe themselves as socialist and dedicated to socialism.
^Sargent, Lyman Tower (2008). Contemporary Political Ideologies: A Comparative Analysis (14th ed.). Wadsworth Publishing. p. 117. ISBN9780495569398. Because many communists now call themselves democratic socialists, it is sometimes difficult to know what a political label really means. As a result, social democratic has become a common new label for democratic socialist political parties.
^Lamb, Peter (2015). Historical Dictionary of Socialism (3rd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. p. 415. ISBN9781442258266. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union, social democracy was adopted by some of the old communist parties. Hence, parties such as the Czech Social Democratic Party, the Bulgarian Social Democrats, the Estonian Social Democratic Party, and the Romanian Social Democratic Party, among others, achieved varying degrees of electoral success. Similar processes took place in Africa as the old communist parties were transformed into social democratic ones, even though they retained their traditional titles [...].