People's Commissar of Food Supply

Source: PSS vol 50

Petitioner—Andrei Vasilievich Ivanov, a worker at the Putilov factory (known to Shlyapnikov and possessing old Party credentials from the time of tsarism).

I told him about yesterday's decree and about the resolution concerning the urgent mobilization of workers by the Commissariat of Labor. I expressed my opinion to him:

if the best Petersburg workers do not create, through selection, a reliable workers' army of 20,000 men for a disciplined and merciless military campaign against the rural bourgeoisie and grafters, then hunger and the destruction of the revolution are inevitable.

* See the present volume, document 122. Ed.