distinction between the village soviet, the village commune, and the committee of the rural poor, and the committee was rarely more responsive to central control than the first two had been. Food supply officials complained that the kombedy focused too little attention on procuring grain and pursued local interests at the expense of the state. Most grain gathered by the kombedy was redistributed within the peasant community. Some committees used their powers to rob fellow peasants or to settle old scores. Bringing the revolution to the countryside did not result in more bread for the city.
Attempts to requisition grain by force, depredations of the kombedy, and an ill-timed attempt at conscription led to uprisings throughout central Russia in November 1918. While Red Army detachments quickly suppressed the poorly organized peasant groups, the 6th Congress of Soviets decided to eliminate the Committees of the Village Poor in November 1918. It ordered new elections to local soviets in which kulaks would not participate. These new, more reliable soviets would replace the committees. This process was little more than a face-saving gesture, as the new soviets were no more pliable than the institutions they replaced. Communist government retreated to the cities, and the only influence it had over rural society was exercised by armed grain-procurement and recruitment detachments.
The kombed experiment failed to create a rural government that was responsive to the center, and failed to procure significant amounts of grain. It did mobilize thousands of peasants to join the Communist Party (including Brezhnev-era ideologue Mikhail Suslov), but without creating a significant Party presence in the countryside. Ambitious, energetic rural party members moved to the cities or joined the Red Army, while most of the members remaining in the villages were soon purged for inactivity. See also: AGRICULTURE; COLLECTIVE FARM; COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brovkin, Vladimir, ed. (1997). The Bolsheviks in Russian Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Figes, Orlando. (1989). Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917-1921). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lih, Lars. (1990). Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921. Berkeley: University of California Press.
The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was established on December 8, 1991, in the Belovezh Accords, which also brought an end to the Soviet Union. These accords were signed by leaders from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and on December 21, 1991, in the Almaty Delcaration and Proctocol to these accords, eight additional states (Moldavia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkemenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan) confirmed their intention to join the CIS and accept the demise of the Soviet state. Georgia joined the CIS in December 1993, bringing total membership to twelve states (the Baltic republics of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia never joined). The organization had several goals, including coordination of members’ foreign and security policies, development of a common economic space, fostering human rights and inter-ethnic concord, maintenance of the military assets of the former USSR, creation of shared transportation and communications networks, environmental security, regulation of migration policy, and efforts to combat organized crime. The CIS had a variety of institutions through which it attempted to accomplish these goals: Council of Heads of State, Council of Heads of Government, Council of Foreign Ministers, Council of Defense Ministers, an inter-parliamentary assembly, Executive Committee, Anti-Terrorism Task Force, and the Interstate Economic Committee of the Economic Union.
Although in a sense the CIS was designed to replace the Soviet Union, it was not and is not a separate state or country. Rather, the CIS is an international organization designed to promote cooperation among its members in a variety of fields. Its headquarters are in Minsk, Belarus. Over the years, its members have signed dozens of treaties and agreements, and some hoped that it would ultimately promote the dynamic development of ties among the newly independent post-Soviet states. By the late 1990s, however, the CIS lost most of its momentum and was victimized by internal rifts, becoming, according to some observers, largely irrelevant and powerless.
From its beginning, the CIS had two main purposes. The first was to promote what was called a “civilized divorce” among the former Soviet states. Many feared the breakup of the Soviet Union would lead to political and economic chaos, if not outright conflict over borders. The earliest agreements of the CIS, which provided for recognition of borders, protection of ethnic minorities, maintenance of a unified military command, economic cooperation, and periodic meetings of state leaders, arguably helped to maintain some semblance of order in the region, although one should note that the region did suffer some serious conflicts (e.g., war between Armenia and Azerbaijan and civil conflicts in Tajikistan, Moldova, and Georgia).
The second purpose of the CIS was to promote integration among the newly independent states. On this score, the CIS had not succeeded. The main reason is that while all parties had a common interest in peacefully dismantling the old order, there has been no consensus among these states as to what (if anything) should replace the Soviet state. Moreover, the need to develop national political and economic systems took precedence in many states, dampening enthusiasm for any project of reinte-gration. CIS members have also been free to sign or not sign agreements as they see fit, creating a hodgepodge of treaties and obligations among CIS states.
One of the clearest failures of the CIS has been on the economic front. Although the member states pledged cooperation, things began to break down early on. By 1993, the ruble zone collapsed, with each state issuing its own currency. In 1993 and 1994, eleven CIS states ratified a Treaty on an Economic Union (Ukraine joined as an associate member). A free-trade zone was proposed in 1994, but by 2002 it still had not yet been fully established. In 1996 four states (Russia, Belarus, Krygyzstan, Kazakhstan) created a Customs Union, but others refused to join. All these efforts were designed to increase trade, but, due to a number of factors, trade among CIS countries has lagged behind targeted figures. More broadly speaking, economic cooperation has suffered because states had adopted economic reforms and programs with little regard for the CIS and have put more emphasis on redirecting their trade to neighboring European or Asian states.
Cooperation in military matters fared little better. The 1992 Tashkent Treaty on Collective Security was ratified by a mere six states. While CIS peacekeeping troops were deployed to Tajikistan and Abkhazia (a region of Georgia), critics viewed these efforts as Russian attempts to maintain a sphere of influence in these states. As a “Monroeski Doctrine” took hold in Moscow, which asserted special rights for Russia on post-Soviet territory,
COMMUNISM
and Russia used its control over energy pipelines to put pressure on other states, there was a backlash by several states against Russia, which weakened the CIS. After September 11, 2001, the CIS created bodies to help combat terrorism, and some hoped that this might bring new life to the organization. See also: BELOVEZH ACCORDS; RUBLE ZONE
Heenan, Patrick, and Lamontagne, Monique, eds. (1999). The CIS Handbook. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. Olcott, Martha Brill; Aslund, Anders; and Garnett, Sherman. (1999). Getting It Wrong: Regional Cooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Sakwa, Richard, and Webber, Mark. (1999). “The Commonwealth of Independent States, 1991-1998: Stagnation and Survival.” Europe-Asia Studies 51:379-415.
In its broadest meaning communism describes a society in which all its members jointly (communally) own its resources and in which the society’s wealth and products are distributed equally to everyone. The term has been applied to premodern social and political constructs, such as communal societies propounded in Plato’s Republic and in Thomas More’s Utopia; to proposals of some radicals in the French Revolution of 1787; and to ideal communities advocated by nineteenth-century reformers such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, but none of these systems corresponded fully with the principles of communism.
Most often, communism designates the ultimate good society espoused by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848 and the ideas and Soviet system in twentieth-century Russia associated with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. The latter usage is a misnomer: Neither Lenin nor later Soviet leaders ever claimed that communism had been established in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, they willingly adopted the label, since it furthered their revolutionary and propagandistic purposes. As a result, in general discussion and writing, the
