[December 21, 1919]

December 21, 1919
Urgent
Ryazan to 3 addresses:
Ryazan Gubernia Committee of the Communist Party, Gubernia Executive Committee, Gubernia Food Committee
Dear Comrades! At your meeting on December 19, you resolved to ship eight hundred carloads of potatoes to the Moscow workers within ten days and outlined a series of measures for its implementation. This is an excellent matter, but the whole gravity of the question lies in how successfully and how quickly you will cope with the task you have set. The working class of Moscow is suffocating from hunger. The question of its salvation is the question of the salvation of the revolution.
The main burden of the struggle against counter-revolution has fallen and continues to fall on the working class of Moscow. The Red Army has defeated Kolchak and Yudenich; Denikin is next. To ensure the Red Army the possibility to cope with this task, which ensures the possibility to end the war and proceed to peaceful socialist construction, with the least expenditure of time and effort, the Moscow worker had to make yet another sacrifice. He had to provide for operational needs those transport facilities that were intended for bringing food to Moscow.
* The telegram is not further deciphered.

Under these conditions, it is natural that the localities surrounding the center of the world revolution must come to its aid. All Party, all Soviet forces must be imbued with the idea that supplying Moscow, saving its working class, constitutes their sacred revolutionary duty. The successes of the revolution depend on your energy, your determination. Everything for procurement, everything for loading and supplying wagons. The dispatch and delivery of food trains to Moscow is ensured by the People's Commissariat of Transport. Demand persistently from the local organs of the People's Commissariat of Transport the fulfillment of this obligation. To work, comrades! For swift, resolute revolutionary assistance to the Moscow workers!
With Communist greetings
V. Ulyanov (Lenin)