Our army is in greatest need of supplies: clothing, footwear, weapons, ammunition. In a devastated country, we must expend enormous effort to meet this need of the army, and the aid of the robbers—the capitalists of England, France, and America—which they so lavishly provide to Kolchak and Denikin, alone saves them from the inevitable collapse due to lack of supplies.

However ravaged Russia may be, it still possesses a very considerable amount of resources that we have not yet utilized, often have not managed to utilize. There are still many undiscovered or unchecked military supply depots, many production capacities being squandered partly due to deliberate sabotage by officials, partly due to red tape, bureaucratic formalism, incompetence, and ineptitude—all these "sins of the past" which with such inevitable and terrible weight bear down upon every revolution making a "leap" to a new social order.

Direct aid to the army is particularly important in this respect. The institutions that conduct this work are in special need of "renewal," of assistance from without, of the voluntary, energetic, heroic initiative of workers and peasants on the ground.

We must call upon the broadest possible participation in this initiative all conscious workers and peasants, all Soviet activists; we must try in various localities and in various sectors of work diverse forms of aid to the army in this matter. "Revolutionary work" is being conducted here far less than in other spheres, while the need for "revolutionary work" here is far more pressing.

The collection of weapons from the population is one of the constituent parts of this work. That in a country which has endured four years of imperialist war, then two popular revolutions, a great deal of weapons are hidden among the peasants and the bourgeoisie—this is natural, it has arisen inevitably. But we must fight this now, in the face of Denikin's menacing invasion, with all our might. Whoever hides or helps to hide weapons is the greatest criminal against workers and peasants; he deserves to be shot, for he is responsible for the death of thousands and thousands of the finest Red Army soldiers, who perish often solely due to lack of weapons at the fronts.

Our Petrograd comrades succeeded in finding thousands and thousands of rifles when they carried out—strictly organized—mass searches. It is necessary that the rest of Russia does not lag behind Petrograd, but in any case catches up and overtakes it.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that rifles are hidden most of all by peasants, and often without any evil intent, but simply out of deep-rooted distrust of all "state authority" and the like. If we have succeeded in doing much and very much (in the best provinces) through persuasion, skillful agitation, and a purposeful approach to the matter for the voluntary return to the Red Army of deserters, then there is no doubt that we can and must do just as much, if not more, for the voluntary return of weapons.

Workers and peasants! Search out the hidden rifles and deliver them to the army! In this way you will save yourselves from beatings, executions, mass floggings, and robbery by Kolchak and Denikin!