Kombed

In Soviet-ruled Russia the Bolshevik authorities established Committees of Poor Peasants (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 peasants 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.

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. 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), 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 of the Congress of Soviets to establish a new institution to assist it in gathering foodstuffs for the country's hungry cities, the Committees of Poor Peasants.

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.

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