Having heard a number of representatives of food organizations, professional workers' unions, and starving peasants on the question of permitting individual organizations to conduct independent grain requisitions, the Council of People's Commissars resolved:

To draw the utmost attention of all organized conscious workers and laboring peasants to the glaring irrationality evident in the very requests for permission to conduct independent requisitions by any separate organizations whatsoever.

Independent requisitions by separate unions and individuals would deprive the workers and laboring peasants of all state organization, would clear the way for kulaks and Skoropadskys, for the strength of workers and laboring peasants lies in unity, not in fragmented food organization.

All workers and hungry peasants must understand that only through joint efforts, by dispatching hundreds and thousands of the best workers into common food detachments, only by mobilizing the united, consolidated forces of workers merged into common masses for the struggle for bread, is it possible to defeat hunger, to defeat disorder, to defeat speculators and kulaks.

Only the foolish would believe those who request permission for independent requisitions, as certain large professional organizations do, forgetting that in every district of the non-starving provinces there are tens, thousands of hungry peasants, there are people not receiving bread.

Is this not disintegration, if each district is to be given a separate requisition? Is it just to grant any separate professional organization tens of millions for independent organization, while not giving tens of millions to each starving district, not granting the latter permission for independent requisitions?

Each railway workshop, each thousand clerks or contract workers, or factory workers must detach the best, most reliable people so that through joint, common efforts they might help the general workers' and peasants' cause of salvation from hunger, help the cause of victory over hunger.

Separate independent requisitions—the ruin of the entire food apparatus, the ruin of the revolution, disintegration, collapse.

The selection from each thousand clerks and workers of the best and devoted people into detachments to form a common workers' combat force for the establishment of order, for aid in supervision, for the collection of all surplus grain, for complete victory over speculation,—only in this lies salvation.

It is necessary that all workers' and laboring peasants' organizations in food matters march in step with the government they themselves have established, submitting to all directives of the Commissariat of Food Supply.

Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars: Ulyanov (Lenin).

People's Commissars: Trotsky. Chicherin. Trutovsky. Stalin. Lander. Stuchka and Tsyurupa.

Manager of Affairs of the Council of People's Commissars: Bonch-Bruevich.

Note: This memorandum to A. D. Tsyurupa was apparently written at a session of the Council of People's Commissars on May 29, 1918, during the discussion of the question of independent requisitions by separate organizations.