We are convinced that in case decisive measures become necessary, we shall be solidly supported by all workers, soldiers, and peasants.
On the 22d of November the walls of the city were placarded with a sheet headed “extraordinary communication”:
The Council of People’s Commissars has received an urgent telegram from the Staff of the Northern Front…
“There must be no further delay; do not let the Army die of hunger; the armies of the Northern Front have not received a crust of bread now for several days, and in two or three days they will not have any more biscuits—which are being doled out to them from reserve supplies until now never touched… Already delegates from all parts of the Front are talking of a necessary removal of part of the Army to the rear, foreseeing that in a few days there will be headlong flight of the soldiers, dying from hunger, ravaged by the three years’ war in the trenches, sick, insufficiently clothed, bare-footed, driven mad by superhuman misery.”
The Military Revolutionary Committee brings this to the notice of the Petrograd garrison and the workers of Petrograd. The situation at the Front demands the most urgent and decisive measures… Meanwhile the higher functionaries of the Government institutions, banks, railroads, post and telegraph, are on strike and impeding the work of the Government in supplying the Front with provisions… Each hour of delay may cost the life of thousands of soldiers. The counter-revolutionary functionaries are the most dishonest criminals toward their hungry and dying brethren on the Front…
The Military Revolutionary Committee gives these criminals a last warning. In event of the least resistance or opposition on their part, the harshness of the measures which will be adopted against them will correspond to the seriousness of their crime…
The masses of workers and soldiers responded by a savage tremor of rage, which swept all Russia. In the capital the
