Committees of Poor Peasants

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.

In the view of historian Orlando Figes: "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.

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.

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.