[15—16 March 1919]

The difficulty of the food supply situation demands emergency measures to save the country from hunger and to achieve the greatest economy of forces and means.

In the sphere of distribution, it is therefore necessary to create a unified distribution apparatus. This is all the more urgent and pressing because all the distribution organs (chiefly divided into three groups: food supply organs, the Workers' Cooperation, and civilian cooperatives) receive the majority of products from one source, and friction between these three groups has already become an unbearable obstacle ** in practice to the work.

The unification of the existing distribution organs must be accomplished *** in such a way that the main apparatus of proper mass distribution, namely the cooperative—as the sole apparatus created and tested by many years of development under capitalism and by practical experience—is not destroyed and not discarded, but is placed at the foundation of the new, preserved, developed, and perfected.

—two crosses in the margins and underlinings made in Lenin's handwriting. Editor's note.