Kombedy (Committees of the Poor)

Establishment and Purpose

By the spring of 1918, chronic food shortages in Soviet cities and peasants' refusal to sell grain at state-fixed prices drove the Bolshevik regime to seek a new lever of control over the countryside. On 11 June 1918, a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) and the Council of People's Commissars, "On the Organization and Supply of the Rural Poor," established kombedy across Soviet Russia. Kulaks, employers of hired labor, and holders of grain surpluses were barred from membership; only poor peasants (bednyaks) could elect and serve on the committees.

Activity and Reality

The kombedy's primary task was to locate and confiscate grain hidden by kulaks, but in practice they functioned as instruments of class warfare that fractured village communities. Many villages, viewing themselves as a single "peasant family," either refused to form a kombed or enrolled every villager on the grounds that all were poor. Committees led by outside agitators, landless craftsmen, and demobilized soldiers frequently resorted to violence: illegal arrests, property requisitions, and general terror against fellow villagers. By November 1918, an estimated 122,000 to 139,000 kombedy had been organized, yet grain procurement fell short of expectations and much of the confiscated grain was redistributed within the village itself.

Dissolution and Legacy

The kombedy's violent methods and their alienation of the middle peasantry (serednyaks) triggered over a hundred large-scale peasant uprisings in the second half of 1918. On 9 November 1918 the Sixth All-Russian Extraordinary Congress of Soviets shifted course toward an "alliance with the middle peasant" and ordered the dissolution of the kombedy and new elections to village soviets. Most kombedy were eliminated by early 1919, though analogous bodies persisted in Ukraine as komnezamy (Committees of Unwealthy Peasants) into the 1920s. The kombed experiment failed to build a durable Soviet social base in the countryside, though it did channel thousands of peasants, including future ideologist Mikhail Suslov, into the Communist Party.