text: A veche was a popular assembly during the Middle Ages. The veche is mentioned during the times of Kievan Rus' and it later became a powerful institution in Russian cities such as Novgorod and Pskov, where the veche acquired great prominence and was broadly similar to the Norse thing or the Swiss Landsgemeinde.
  Etymology
  The word veche is a transliteration of the Russian "вече" (), which is in turn inherited from Proto-Slavic  (), which is also represented in the word soviet, both ultimately deriving from the Proto-Slavic verbal stem of  ). There is a relation to "-vice" in "advice", and somewhat more distantly to Sanskrit , Germanic words like "wise" (English), , "witch" () and many others, which however come from a different Indo-European root. Likewise, there exists misinformation claiming that the semantic derivation that yields the meaning of the word under consideration is parallel to that of .
  History
  Origins
  Procopius of Caesarea mentioned Slavs gathering in popular assemblies in the 6th century: