HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

In Soviet-ruled
Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...
the
Bolshevik The Bolsheviks (russian: Большевики́, from большинство́ ''bol'shinstvó'', 'majority'),; derived from ''bol'shinstvó'' (большинство́), "majority", literally meaning "one of the majority". also known in English ...
authorities established Committees of Poor easants'' (russian: Комитеты Бедноты, ''komitety bednoty'' or russian: комбеды, ''kombedy'', commonly rendered in English as kombeds) during the second half of 1918 as local institutions bringing together impoverished
peasant A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants ...
s to advance government policy. The committees had as their primary task grain requisitioning on behalf of the Soviet state; they also distributed manufactured goods in rural areas. After 1918 Committees of Poors were disbanded, while in Ukraine were introduced Committee of Unwealthy Peasants (komnezam).


Institutional history


Establishment

By the spring of 1918, a situation of chronic food shortage existed in the cities of Soviet Russia and urban manufacturing threatened to grind to a halt.Orlando Figes, "The Village Commune and Rural Government," in Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Chernalaev, and William G. Rosenberg (eds.), ''Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921.'' Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997; pp. 464–465. Local village assemblies were insufficient to the task of gathering foodstuffs for the cities, a crisis which the Bolsheviks attributed to the domination of local government by wealthy opponents of the new regime. A new "class war" was desired in the village to empower the rural poor in support of the Soviet regime. According to Bolshevik doctrine, the Russian peasantry was divided into three categories: poor peasants (''bednyaks''), individuals who were forced to sell their labor to others to survive and were thus regarded as natural allies of the new Soviet regime; "middle" peasants (''serednyaks''), who conducted farming operations on their own land with their own labor; and wealthy peasants (''
kulaks Kulak (; russian: кула́к, r=kulák, p=kʊˈlak, a=Ru-кулак.ogg; plural: кулаки́, ''kulakí'', 'fist' or 'tight-fisted'), also kurkul () or golchomag (, plural: ), was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned ove ...
''), who profited through the hired labor of others. On June 11, 1918, the People's Commissariat for Food Supplies (Narkomprod) of Soviet Russia was instructed by the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee The All-Russian Central Executive Committee ( rus, Всероссийский Центральный Исполнительный Комитет, Vserossiysky Centralny Ispolnitelny Komitet, VTsIK) was the highest legislative, administrative and r ...
of the
Congress of Soviets The Congress of Soviets was the supreme governing body of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and several other Soviet republics from 1917 to 1936 and a somewhat similar Congress of People's Deputies from 1989 to 1991. After the crea ...
to establish a new institution to assist it in gathering foodstuffs for the country's hungry cities, the Committees of Poor Peasants.George Jackson and Robert Devlin (eds.), ''Dictionary of the Russian Revolution.'' Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989; pp. 145–146. Membership in these kombeds was to be denied to all wealthy peasants as well as to those who hired labor or held surplus grain. The kombeds were given the task of helping to locate and confiscate surplus grain from other peasants of that same village. The groups were also placed in charge of the distribution of food, manufactured commodities, and those limited agricultural implements that were available to the members of the village. This activity inevitably brought the members of the kombed into conflict with others in the village from whom grain was taken.


Nature

In the view of many experts, the kombeds were doomed by a poor understanding of the true essence of the soviet peasantry. In the view of historian
Orlando Figes Orlando Guy Figes () is a British historian and writer. Until his retirement, he was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Figes is known for his works on Russian history, such as ''A People's Tragedy'' (1996), ''Natas ...
:
"Most villages thought of themselves as farming communities of equal members related by kin—they often called themselves a 'peasant family'—and as such were hostile to the idea of a separate body for the poor. They either failed to elect a kombed, leaving it to outside agitators, or else set up one which every peasant joined on the grounds that all the villagers were poor. ... The poor peasants were simply not aware of themselves as '
proletarian The proletariat (; ) is the social class of wage-earners, those members of a society whose only possession of significant economic value is their labour power (their capacity to work). A member of such a class is a proletarian. Marxist philoso ...
s'. They all thought of themselves as fellow villagers and looked at the efforts of the Bolsheviks to split them with suspicion and hostility.
"Consequently, most of the ''kombedy'' were set up by elements from outside the
commune A commune is an alternative term for an intentional community. Commune or comună or comune or other derivations may also refer to: Administrative-territorial entities * Commune (administrative division), a municipality or township ** Communes of ...
. These were not the poor peasant farmers but immigrant townsmen and soldiers, landless craftsmen, and laborers excluded from the land commune. ... Disconnected from the peasant commune, upon which all rural government depended, they were unable to carry out their tasks without resort to violence. They requisitioned private property, made illegal arrests, vandalized churches, and generally terrorized the peasants. It was more like a local
mafia "Mafia" is an informal term that is used to describe criminal organizations that bear a strong similarity to the original “Mafia”, the Sicilian Mafia and Italian Mafia. The central activity of such an organization would be the arbitration of d ...
than an organ of the Soviet state."
Figes notes that many members of these kombeds were quick to resort to such brutality in the "desperate struggle to procure foodstuffs and military supplies" and that they sometimes were a means for local officials to "operate networks of corruption and extortion from the peasantry."Orlando Figes, ''Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921''. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989; pg. 187. The vast majority of members of the Committees of Poor Peasants were not affiliated with the
Communist Party A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A ...
, with a majority categorized as "non-Party" individuals and a small minority listed in official records as "sympathetic" to the party.Aaron B. Retish, ''Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922''. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2008; pg. 196. Most were supportive of the 1917 revolution, however, and many saw themselves as "true representatives of the people's government" and sought to carry out their assigned duties loyally.Retish, ''Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil War'', pg. 198.


Disestablishment and legacy

In the fall of 1918, the need of the Soviet state to forge closer relations with the peasantry in the face of the Russian Civil War and a desire to eliminate the emerging "dual power" in each village between kombed and village soviet led to pressure for the abolition of the kombeds and the transfer of their functions to the village soviets. In addition to alienating the overwhelming masses of the peasantry from the Soviet state through their often abusive methods of grain seizure, the kombeds additionally came to be seen as an institution which usurped the authority of the regular institutions of soviet government, the village soviets. On December 2, 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets decreed the amalgamation of the kombeds with the village soviets. The kombeds were thereby effectively eliminated in Russia by late in the spring of 1919. In Ukraine kombeds existed until after the NEP. Although their establishment was brief, lasting less than a year, the number of kombeds established in Soviet Russia was vast and their influence in 1918–1919 was pervasive. According to Soviet historian V.R. Garasimiuk, a total of 131,637 kombeds were established in the various provinces of Soviet Russia in this period.V.R. Gerasimiuk, "Nekotorye novye statisticheskie dannye o kombedaky RSFSR" ("A few new statistical facts regarding the kombedy of the RSFSR"), ''Voprosy istorii'', 1963, No. 6, pp. 209–210. Cited in Aaron B. Retish, ''Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil War'', pg. 193.


See also

* Soviet forced grain requisitioning (Prodrazvyorstka) *
Russian Civil War , date = October Revolution, 7 November 1917 – Yakut revolt, 16 June 1923{{Efn, The main phase ended on 25 October 1922. Revolt against the Bolsheviks continued Basmachi movement, in Central Asia and Tungus Republic, the Far East th ...


Footnotes

{{reflist, 2 1918 establishments in Russia 1919 disestablishments Russian Civil War