They are clearly an ideology.

maybe I am biased but,well actually in real history, soviets was primary associated with revolutions in 1917.. And later soviets (sovets, international soviets,before second world war)

was umbrella organization for maintaining stalins power over non-cccp communistic parties... viz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_(council)

Thus for me soviet as a nationallity doesn´t makes sense,  if it will some form of goverment (opposite to primary democratics forms of goverments) well yeah, it will makes sense...

But I dont knew how much devs wanna makes humankind inspired with real history, and how much it will be fictional...

Does anyone know an acceptable alternative to "The Soviets" ?

Soviet Russians. The dominant imposed culture in USSR was Russian.

Well, Russia is already part of the Industrial Age, so why not have a Soviet Russia or Soviet Italy after a revolution or two.. ? Seems much more straightforward and in accordance with the Civics system to me.

No, Soviets refers specifically to the citizens of the USSR, which was a culture just as much as any other country's culture. Their ideology was Communism.

Marmot wrote:

No, Soviets refers specifically to the citizens of the USSR, which was a culture just as much as any other country's culture. Their ideology was Communism.

It is not quite right. They widely use word combination "soviet ideology" as a name for local early phase of "communist ideology". Meaning, "communism" is for the future of all Earth's people, but here and now, specifically, we adopt "soviet ideology". But there was "soviet culture" — in fact and in commonly speaking. But it is not national or ethnic culture. It is more like "metalhead culture" or "christian culture" or "communist culture": everyone is able to adopt it and keep his local ethnic culture, where it makes no contradictions.

Mausklickmoerder wrote:

Well, Russia is already part of the Industrial Age, so why not have a Soviet Russia or Soviet Italy after a revolution or two.. ? Seems much more straightforward and in accordance with the Civics system to me.

Soviet Russia was only a part of Soviet Union. Equalizing entire USSR to simply Russians is an insult to other soviet republics. Also it would be historically inaccurate, because Soviet Union consisted of many nationalities and one of the key aspects of soviet culture was "Дружба народов" ("friendship of Peoples") , which means those nationalities weren't considered to be a part of Russian culture. 

zayebeast wrote:

Soviet Russia was only a part of Soviet Union. Equalizing entire USSR to simply Russians is an insult to other soviet republics.

Pff, hah, gods NO! XD

We'll leave the "honor" to deem itself the legal successor of the Soviet Union to the largest country of the world.

zayebeast wrote:

Also it would be historically inaccurate, because Soviet Union consisted of many nationalities and one of the key aspects of soviet culture was "Дружба народов" ("friendship of Peoples")  

Key aspect was to create New Soviet man, Homo Sovieticus, devoid of cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity. At the cost of all other nations apart Russians, of course.

zayebeast wrote:

which means those nationalities weren't considered to be a part of Russian culture. 

All-Russian nation wasn't even a new concept at the time, yet since 1954 myth about triune nation that was separated and brought together again was elevated to state ideology status.

> 2)  a citizen of the former Soviet Union.

It is a slang, running from Cold War propaganda. Someone calls Americans "Yankee", but it is, obviously, not their official name, and will look strange among "French", "Chinese" and "Egyptians".

Sublustris wrote:

All-Russian nation wasn't even a new concept at the time, yet since 1954 myth about triune nation that was separated and brought together again was elevated to state ideology status.

It looks like Russian isn't your native language otherwise you would have known that word "русский" "(Russian)" can be an adjective to both Russia and Ruthenia (also known as Kievan Rus'), although today former is more widely used. The idea of triune nation isn't about Russia, it is about a Country that had existed hundreds of years before Russia or Moscovia and is considered to be a cultural ancestor by modern Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians - Kievan Rus'. With that being said, the idea of Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians being a part of larger cultural group doesn't mean that Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian cultures don't exist the same way existence of national culture doesn't deny existence of regional cultures.

I'm not going to respond to the rest of your post, because it looks more like projection of you subjective opinion about USSR rather than critique of my points.

Sublustris wrote:

No, darling, it isn't my native language, although I know it enough to understand that adjective from "Русь" whould be "руський", not "русский" that comes from Greek transliteration Rossia. And although Russians took that ethnonym as their own, this is far from full story. Common Proto-Slavic ancestors did exist, but almost three thousand years prior to Kyivan Rus', situated between rivers Dniester and Dnipro, almost fully within modern borders of Ukraine. In 9th century Rus' started not as mono-ethnicity, but rather as dozens of tribes of Proto-Slavic origin. Surprise-surprise, major bulk of tribes that created Russian ethnicity weren't of that origin - they were Finno-Ugrian peoples: Karelians, Komi, Udmurts, Mari and Mordvins. Those barely had much common with Kyivan Rus', apart that they were neighbors. How different they were in 13th century depicted Flemish missionary, William of Rubruck, that traveled Mongol Empire and wrote accounts on people that he had met: "The country beyond the Tanais (city in the Don river delta) is most beautiful, with rivers and forests. To the north are great forests, inhabited by two races of men: to wit, the Moxel (The Mordvins, also Mordva, Mordvinians), who are without any religion, a race of pure pagans [J: have no law and are exclusively heathen]. They have no towns, but only little hamlets in the forest."

There was a portion of Slavs/Ruthenians in those lands, but it was minor among many other ethnicities that lived there. 

I'm neither a historian, nor am I an expert in Slavic culture, and this is definitely not a place for such topic. So, I won't try to prove you whether the idea of triune is correct or not, as I didn't try to do this in previous post, since it has nothing to do with original topic. Word "русский" may not be a correct adjective for Ruthenia, but it is widely used as it, and from context you can derive that your article was not talking about Russia. 

According to Soviet Census of 1989 49.2% of soviet citizens were not Russian and approximately 30% were not even Slavic. Non Russian cultures may have been under-represent compared to Russian, but they were still recognized as separate ethnicities. Passports in USSR had "citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" written in them not "citizen of Russia" or "citizen of Soviet Russia". So, why people who were living in Soviet Union shouldn't be called Soviets?

Also, you may have noticed that I talk mostly about USSR and never about post soviet countries because Soviet culture card refers specifically to post WWII USSR, so question of who is the successor is irrelevant. 

According to Soviet Census of 1989 49.2% of soviet citizens were not Russian and approximately 30% were not even Slavic. Non Russian cultures may have been under-represent compared to Russian, but they were still recognized as separate ethnicities. Passports in USSR had "citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" written in them not "citizen of Russia" or "citizen of Soviet Russia". So, why people who were living in Soviet Union shouldn't be called Soviets?

Also, you may have noticed that I talk mostly about USSR and never about post soviet countries because Soviet culture card refers specifically to post WWII USSR, so question of who is the successor is irrelevant. 

Well, this is a rather compelling argument. I think I'm team just call them soviets now. Part of me was worried, as @lex-kravetski pointed out above, that soviet was english slang in the same vein as yankee, but it looks like the word was adopted by the people themselves and used as an identity descriptor. But, lex-kravetsi also pointed out that Soviet, as an ideology, is tricky because it resists national classification and identity, making the name game a bit difficult.

Linguistically, Soviet is an adjective being forced to play as a noun to describe a specific people. Properly, it shouldnt be used all by itself, but "USSRians" is silly and "United Soviet Socialist Republicans" is too wordy while getting into the same muddy water as USA being simplified to "American".

"American" is vague, like Soviet, but its broad geographically instead of philosophically. "American" technically includes mexicans, canadians, brazilians, argentinians, etc, but the word is used to specifically to talk about citizens of the United States of America because its the simplest descriptor in the title that the people use to describe themselves and, importantly, isnt reflexively used by another people group. "Nativie American" nations all had specific people group names, and America itself was a non-native word for the land. Back in colonial times, it was common for any colonist to simply be referred to as an American since the distinction was irrelivant to the colonizing countries, afterall they were still citizens of their respective countries. Over time, however, "American" stopped being used to describe "People in the Americas" and gave way to more modern identifiers. All except for USA. Since there's no other people group that uses the word for specific identification that doesn't also have a second equally used identifier, there's no need to specify with "United Americans" or something like that.

Using the same logic, so long as there are no other nations whose people used the word "Soviets" to describe themselves and had other nations using the word to describe them while not also having a readily available secondary identifier, Soviet is both appropriate and useful as a descriptor for the citizens of the USSR in my opinion.

See, all this could have been avoided if Soviet Russia was just Russia after a revolution.