A revolutionary committee or revkom (Russian: Революционный комитет, ревком) were Bolshevik-led organizations in Soviet Russia and other Soviet republics established to serve as provisional governments and temporary Soviet administrations in territories under the control of the Red Army in 1918–1920, during the Russian Civil War and foreign military intervention.
The forms of their work were inherited from Military Revolutionary Committees of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Revolutionary committees were often created in anticipation of the advances of the Red Army.
In other cases they were created underground from local populations under the guidance of Bolsheviks, subsequently organizing an insurgency and then inviting the Red Army for help, as in the case of the Azerbaijani Revkom, which seized power in Baku when English troops were evacuated and then asked Moscow for help.
According to the decree of VTsIK (central Soviet legislative body), On Revolutionary Committees (October 24, 1919), there were three major types of revkoms: In most territories all lower level revkoms were abolished by January 1920, with some exceptions: