At the start of the 20th century, the Russian Empire was an autocracy controlled by Tsar Nicholas II, with millions of the country 's largely agrarian population living in abject poverty and the anti-communist historian Robert Service noted that "poverty and oppression constituted the best soil for Marxism to grow in ''. The man responsible for largely introducing the ideology into the country was Georgi Plekhanov, although the movement itself was largely organised by a man known as Vladimir Lenin, who had for a time been exiled to a prison camp in Siberia by the Tsarist government for his beliefs. A Marxist group known as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was formed in the country, although it soon divided into two main factions: the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and the Mensheviks led by Julius Martov. In 1905, there was a revolution against the Tsar 's rule, in which workers ' councils known as "soviets '' were formed in many parts of the country and the Tsar was forced to implement democratic reform, introducing an elected government, the Duma.
during the 1900s the term soviet was initially the name for
workers ' councils