Feel free to split hairs if it makes you feel better to dispute what happened during the civil war.

The Soviet Union managed to kill millions in the 1930s as well.

A soviet is a local official (elected, I think) in Communism. It is not necessarily tied to the USSR. The soviet system was in place at this time, as is mentioned throughout the article.

Soviet is a council, as in a governing committee.

As in the Russian word совет, lit. advice or council.

When Lenin pushed the motto вся власть Советамъ it was as I outlined above. In neither sense it means a person/official.

While that is techically correct, the best kind of correct, it is bit misleading not to mention that it was Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic that existed for some years during the Russian civil war and formed the Soviet Union in 1922.

For all intents and purposes it is the same political entity.

For a simple (but imperfect, as all are) analogy that should be familiar to HNers, the pre-USSR RSFSR is like the pre-Alphabet Google, the USSR-era RSFSR is like the Alphabet-era Google, and the USSR is to the RSFSR as Alphabet is to Google.

And “Soviet” as an adjective describes organs of the RSFSR, those of any of the other soviet republics that came to constitute the USSR, or of the USSR itself.