[29 May 1918]

All separate apparatus serving food supply organizations of individual professions, such as "Prodput'" or "Prodvoda" and the like, are invited to unite their efforts, their forces, their agents, their detachments with the general forces of the Commissariat of Food Supply. Refusal to effect such a union of forces means or would mean refusal to support Soviet power, refusal to aid the all-working-class and all-peasant struggle against famine. Only in the union of forces lies salvation from famine.

Simultaneously, the Council of People's Commissars charges the Commissar of Food Supply with ensuring that factory workers, workers and employees of railway and water transport, the army and navy receive enhanced rations, satisfying their needs in the first instance.

The Commissariat of Food Supply is recommended to preserve the food supply organizations of the army and navy, of railway and water transport, with a view to distributing bread among these categories of the population as correctly as possible, taking into account as precisely as possible all technical peculiarities of their food supply services. The composition of the Small Food Supply Council is expanded by the addition of representatives from Glavvoda and the united State metal factories.

An appeal to the workers' organizations of railway and water transport was written by Lenin, apparently at the same session of the Council of People's Commissars on 29 May 1918; the appeal, in somewhat altered form, was published as a "Decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the Question of Independent Procurement by Various Organizations," signed by members of the Council of People's Commissars. *Petrogradskaya Pravda*, No. 447, 25 May 1918. The appeal is printed according to the manuscript; the Council of People's Commissars decree is printed according to the newspaper text in the appendix (see p. 405).