Order by the Chairman of the Supreme Military Council and the People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs

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The fight with the Czecho-White-Guards is dragging out too long. Slovenliness, negligence and faint-heartedness in our own ranks are our foes’ best allies. Anglo-French agents are roaming around everywhere scattering gold to right and left. They are bribing all the officers who are for sale. They are inciting the railway workers and the officials of the postal and telegraph services to commit sabotage. Their hired agitators are everywhere penetrating into Red Army units, bringing confusion and trouble.

An end must be put to this. The country needs calm and it needs grain. The Czecho-White-Guards are depriving it of both. They must be destroyed.

Allies, direct and indirect, of the Czechoslovaks – counter-revolutionaries, agitators and saboteurs – must be ground to dust. Leaving for the Czechoslovak front, I send my greetings to all those who, in the army, on the railways, in grain-procurement or in the postal and telegraph services are honesty and valiantly defending the freedom and independence of the working class and the working peasantry.

Honor and glory to the valiant fighters.

At the same time, I issue this warning: no quarter will be given to the enemies of the people, the agents of foreign imperialism, the hirelings of the bourgeoisie. In the train of the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, where this order is being written, a Military Revolutionary Tribunal is in session, consisting of Comrade Smidovich, chairman of the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, Comrade Gusev, representing the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs, and Comrade Zhigmund, representing the People’s Commissariat of Communications.

The Military Revolutionary Tribunal has been given unlimited powers within the zone of the railway line, which is placed under martial law.

Comrade Kamenshchikov, whom I have charged with the defense of the Moscow-Kazan line, has arranged for the setting up, at Murom, Arzamas and Sviyazhsk, of concentration camps for the imprisonment of suspicious agitators, counter-revolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites and speculators, other than those who are to be shot at the scene of their crimes or else sentenced by the Military Revolutionary Tribunal to other punishments. I warn responsible Soviet officials in all areas where military operations are in progress, and in the zone of military movements, that we shall be doubly exacting towards them. The Soviet Republic will punish its negligent and criminal servants no less severely than its enemies. The country’s terrible situation obliges us to take terrible measures.

The Soviet Republic is in peril! Woe to those who, directly or indirectly, aggravate its peril!