The Committees of Poor Peasants (Russian: Комитеты Бедноты, komitety bednoty, commonly rendered in English as kombeds) were established during the second half of 1918 as local institutions bringing together impoverished peasants to advance government policy. The committees were primarily in charge of grain requisitioning on behalf of the Soviet state as well as the rural distribution of manufactured goods. The kombeds quickly fell into disrepute among the bulk of the peasantry over the abuses of their members, who were often outsiders to the village and who were paid a commission by the state for all grain obtained. The need of the Bolshevik government to establish closer relations with the peasantry during the Russian Civil War lead to the merger of the Committees of Poor Peasants with the village soviets starting in December 1918.
Famous quotes containing the words committees, poor and/or peasants:
“A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn.”
—C. Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993)
“Someone is dead.
Even the trees know it,
those poor old dancers who come on lewdly,
all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The sacrifice to Legba was completed; the Master of the Crossroads had taken the loas’ mysterious routes back to his native Guinea.
Meanwhile, the feast continued. The peasants were forgetting their misery: dance and alcohol numbed them, carrying away their shipwrecked conscience in the unreal and shady regions where the savage madness of the African gods lay waiting.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)