With each passing day, the food situation of the Republic deteriorates.
Grain is being delivered to the consuming districts in ever smaller quantities.
Hunger has already arrived; its terrible breath is felt in the cities, factory centers, and consuming provinces.
Hungry and exhausted workers and peasant poor, courageously enduring all the painful consequences of the criminal imperialist war, turn to the authorities with agonizing questions:
Why is there no bread?
When, finally, will the suffering of hungry people cease?
What is the authorities doing to alleviate the food crisis?
What must workers and peasant poor do in order to escape from this situation and prevent hunger from destroying the conquests of the revolution?
To all these entirely natural questions, the workers' and peasants' government must give clear and definite answers, having spoken all the truth.
Comrade workers and peasants! There is less bread in Russia, thanks to the human slaughter which the bourgeoisie of the entire world has been waging for these past four years in the name of their criminal and selfish interests.
War has torn people away from productive labor. For more than three years it has kept the Russian tiller of the soil under arms, and this has led to a decrease in the sown area in the Republic.
Nevertheless, through the greatest exertion of its strength, Russia gathered in 1917 such a quantity of bread as would have been sufficient for the entire population of the Republic and there would still have remained a considerable surplus.
But the betrayal of the bourgeoisie and its hangers-on led to the fact that the most fertile provinces fell under the power of the Germans.
The Republic was deprived of enormous grain reserves remaining in Novorossiya, Little Russia, and the South-Western region.
As a consequence of the bourgeoisie's treachery, the country faces the danger of losing even those colossal grain reserves which exist in the Northern Caucasus.
Only Siberia, the Urals region, part of the Volga region, and certain Great Russian provinces are the most reliable sources of grain supply for the consuming districts.
If one calculates all the quantity of grain remaining at the disposal of the Republic, it will turn out that the existing grain reserves, after covering feed and seed needs, will barely suffice to satisfy the food needs of the population, and then only on the condition of strict accounting of all grain reserves, the absolute confiscation of all surpluses from those holding them, and the fair distribution of grain among those in need.