DECREE OF THE SOVNARKOM ON INDEPENDENT PROCUREMENT BY VARIOUS ORGANIZATIONS
[May 29, 1918]
All separate apparatuses serving the food supply organizations of individual professions, such as "Prodput'" or "Prodvod" and the like, are invited to combine their efforts, their forces, their agents, their detachments with the general forces of the Commissariat of Food Supply. Refusal to do so would mean or would have meant a refusal to support the Soviet power, a refusal to help the common workers' and peasants' struggle against hunger. Only in the combination of forces is salvation from hunger.
At the same time, the Sovnarkom entrusts the Commissar of Food Supply to ensure that factory workers, railway and water transport workers, the army, and the navy receive an increased ration, satisfying them first.
The Commissariat of Food Supply is recommended to preserve the food supply organizations of the army and navy, railway and water transport, in order to distribute bread among these categories of the population as accurately as possible, taking into account all technical peculiarities of their food supply. The composition of the Small Food Council is supplemented by representatives of the Main Water Transport and the combined State Metal Works.
The appeal to the railway and water transport workers' organizations was written by Lenin, apparently at the same meeting of the Sovnarkom on May 29, 1918; the appeal, in a somewhat modified form, was published as the "Resolution of the Sovnarkom on the issue of independent procurement by various organizations" signed by the members of the Council of People's Commissars. "Petrogradskaya Pravda" No. 447, May 25, 1918. The appeal is printed from the manuscript, the Sovnarkom resolution— from the text of the newspaper in the appendix (see p. 405).