Peasant Committees

mass revolutionary organizations in Russia during the Revolution of 1905-07. Peasant committees were organized chiefly in areas where there was a mass peasant movement—the central Russian provinces, the Volga Region, the Ukraine, the Oblast Voiska Donskogo (Oblast of the Don Cossack Host), Georgia, and Latvia.

Under the leadership of the peasant committees, the peasants removed local government officials and refused to pay taxes and rent and supply army recruits. They raided the landlords’ estates, seized land and movable property from them, and engaged in armed clashes with troops.

V. I. Lenin considered the peasant committees organs of the rebellion and seeds of revolutionary rule in the countryside. The Bolsheviks agitated for the creation of peasant committees and struggled against the Cadets’ (Constitutional Democrats’) influence in them. Although they formed temporary militant alliances with the SR’s (Socialist Revolutionaries) and other democratic revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks exposed the programmatic and tactical errors of these parties with regard to the peasant committees and expressed their disagreement with the Mensheviks’ underestimation of the committees. With the defeat of the revolution, the peasant committees were suppressed between November and December 1905 and early 1906.