Resolved: that the functions of the Committees of the Poor are to be entrusted to the volost’ and village soviets.
After the vote had been taken, Comrade Kaplev [the deputy chairman] informed the conference in the name of the local committee of Communists-Bolsheviks that apparently the majority of those attending the conference had voted against the decision of the central authority due to a misunderstanding. For this reason, on the basis of the decree and instructions concerning the matter, the party will send to the localities its representatives, who will explain to the population the significance of the Committees of the Poor and proceed to organize them, in accordance with the [government’s] decree.110
In this fashion, party officials invalidated the vote of the peasants rejecting the creation of Committees of the Poor. Using such strong-arm methods, by December 1918 the Bolsheviks organized 123,000 kombedy, or slightly more than one per two villages.111 Whether these organizations actually functioned or even existed it is impossible to tell: one suspects that in many cases they existed only on paper. In the majority of cases, the chairmen of the kombedy either belonged to the Communist Party or declared themselves “sympathizers.”112 In the latter case they were under the thumb of outsiders, mainly urban apparatchiki, for at this time there were almost no peasants in the Communist Party: a statistical survey of twelve provinces of central Russia indicated in 1919 only 1,585 Communists in the rural areas.113
Moscow saw the kombedy as a transitional institution: it was Lenin’s intention to have them transformed into soviets. In November 1918 he declared: “We shall fuse the kombedy with the soviets, we will arrange it so that the kombedy will become soviets.”114 The next day, Zinoviev addressed the Congress of Soviets on this subject. He declared that it was the task of the kombedy to reshape rural soviets so that they would resemble urban ones, that is, become organs of “socialist construction.” This required nationwide “re-elections” to the rural soviets on the basis of rules which the Central Executive Committee would lay down.115 These rules were announced on December 2.116 Here it was stated that because the rural soviets had been elected before the “socialist revolution” reached the countryside, they continued to be dominated by “kulaks.” It had now become necessary to bring rural soviets into “full harmony” with the urban ones. Nationwide réélections to soviets on the village and volost’ level were to take place under the supervision of the kombedy. To ensure that the new rural soviets acquired a proper “class” character, the executives of the provincial city soviets would supervise the elections and where necessary, remove from them undesirable elements.* Kulaks and other speculators and exploiters were to be disenfranchised. Ignoring the provisions of the 1918 Constitution that all power in the country belonged to the soviets, the decree defined the “main task” of the freshly elected rural soviets to be the “realization of all the decisions of the corresponding higher organs of the Soviet authority”—that is, the central government. Their own authority—closely modeled on that of the zemstva of tsarist Russia—was to be confined to raising the “cultural and economic standards” of their area by such means as gathering statistical data, promoting local industry, and helping the government to appropriate grain. In other words, they were to be transformed primarily into conveyors of bureaucratic decisions and secondarily into institutions charged with improving the living conditions of the population. Once they had accomplished their mission, kombedy were to be dissolved.†
