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:
“Cry cry what shall I cry?
The first thing to do is to form the committees:
The consultative councils, the standing committees, select committees and sub-committees.
One secretary will do for several committees.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Among all the modernized aspects of the most luxurious of industries, the model, a vestige of voluptuous barbarianism, is like some plunder-laden prey. She is the object of unbridled regard, a living bait, the passive realization of an ideal.... No other female occupation contains such potent impulses to moral disintegration as this one, applying as it does the outward signs of riches to a poor and beautiful girl.”
—Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle Colette] (1873–1954)
“We sing the funeral, as goes the custom, with the hymn of the Dead. But Manuel, he chose a hymn for the living: the song of the coumbite, the song of the earth, of the water, the plants, of fellowship between peasants because he wanted, as I now understand it, that his death for you be the renewal of life.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)