Prepare for Front Week

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Front Week begins on January 21. Front Week must be carried out all over the country with all the energy that corresponds to the great importance of this work. Our front is victorious throughout its length of several thousand versts. Our victories have been won through the countless efforts of individual Red Army men. Each morning the Soviet country receives news of enemy regiments defeated, trophies captured, cities taken. This means that armed workers and peasants have shed their blood again and again, and laid down their lives for the cause of socialism, while those who have survived have, with great efforts and privations, overcome the resistance put up by the enemy and by nature.

The coldest time of the year has come. The layer of snow grows thicker and thicker. Things get harder and harder for the infantryman, the cavalryman and the gunner. In various sectors of the front, epidemic diseases have spread from the enemy camp into our ranks. Yet, despite everything, the Red front keeps its staunchness, advances, beats the enemy and conquers.

We did not succeed in finishing our military work before the onset of winter. We must exert every effort to finish it off before spring comes, before the thaw and the time when the roads become impassable. For this purpose we need to support, strengthen and reinforce the front. Front Week is a week of mobilisation of the whole rear for active aid to our fighters. Our first thought and first concern must be for the wounded and the sick. They must be given priority in help and kindness. However poor our country, it will find and collect a great deal in order to ease the position of the soldiers disabled from active service with the Red Army. Warm underwear, books, newspapers – to the field hospitals, to the casualty clearing stations, to the front. The most important, most valuable gift to the front will be fresh reinforcements. It is on this matter that not only the local military commissariats but also all Soviet authorities must now concentrate their whole attention. Those accepted at the test call-up must nowhere be held back even for a single hour. All must be sent forward into the holding units. Work in the holding units must be doubled and trebled. Model reinforcement companies must be drawn from those units, and during Front Week these companies must flow in a broad stream into the army’s depleted ranks.

Preparations for Front Week must intensify the fight against those who have left the front. The commission for combating desertion, helped by all Soviet institutions, must before January 21 winkle out the self-seekers from every place where they have hidden, and concentrate them in punishment units.

Preparation for Front Week is not a matter for the War Department alone. No, the entire working class, the entire conscious peasantry must lend a hand in this work. Not a single Soviet institution must hold aloof, neither in Moscow, nor in Petrograd, nor in the remotest volost. The Communist Party organisations will be in the forefront of this work. The trade unions and the co-operatives will do their duty. The woman worker will take an active part in the work for the wounded and sick warriors. The Young Communist League organisations will show that they do not forget their elder brothers who are fighting, even for a single hour.

May the month that remains be a time of intense, tireless, all-sided and combined preparation for Front Week.

There must be not one honest citizen, man or woman, in the Soviet Republic, who holds aloof from this work!

At the sessions of all our institutions, at all assemblies and meetings, the chairman must remind those present of the coming Front Week, which is to prepare and ensure complete victory before the onset of spring!

Working men and working women, peasants and peasant women, prepare for Front Week!

December 22, 1919

Petrograd