in the campaign “Soviet-Ukrainian War: Second Invasion and Resource Depletion (1919)”
Mezhlauk, deputy war minister of the Soviet colonial administration of Ukraine (the UkrSSR), telegraphed Lenin on 5 April 1919: Ukraine must not be looked upon "as a promised land" of inexhaustible reserves - its resources had to be counted among the all-Russian ones as soon as possible and used under a single plan[1]. In the second half of April 1919 Lenin, head of the RSFSR government, proposed that the Petrograd organizations ship workers to Ukraine to replenish stocks of food and fuel: "Continue the mobilization of workers in Piter, extending it to Ukraine and the Don... I advise sending these workers en masse to Ukraine, the Don, the East for 3 months. It is foolish to starve and perish in Piter when bread and coal can be won back"[2]. By a decree of 12 April 1919 this administration obliged every village to hand over to the state the amount of grain assigned to it[3]. The grain was taken from Ukrainians by the administration's food ministry: it sent armed workers' detachments into the villages, and alongside them the grain was seized by detachments of the Bolsheviks' secret police - the extraordinary commissions (Cheka) - and by units of the Russian army[3]. These detachments confiscated peasants' property and implements, took hostages, and made a whole village answer for a single inhabitant. Detachments of the same ministry and of the Cheka intercepted, on roads and at railway stations, Ukrainians carrying grain for barter or sale outside the state monopoly: the food was seized, and carrying grain was punished up to and including execution[3]. Refusing to hand over property cost lives: in June 1919 agents of the Kherson district extraordinary commission detained Nykyfor Potachenko, a 24-year-old peasant of the village of Roksandrivka in Kherson district, "for unwillingness to provide horses"; by the commission's resolution he was shot on the night of 15 June (a local history publication gives 15 July) in the basement of the Tyulpanov house - twice he climbed out of the filled-in grave alive, and only the third execution killed him[4].
On 14 June 1919 Lenin telegraphed Kyiv at three addresses at once - Rakovsky, head of the colonial administration, Shlikhter, its food minister, and Podvoisky, its war minister - shifting the supply of the Russian fronts onto Ukrainian grain: "In view of the utter impossibility of provisioning the Western and Northern fronts from the exhausted stocks of the Centre, the whole weight of this state task naturally passes to the delegation of Tsekomprodarm, led by Orlov and working under Trotsky's order for the entire Russian army as a whole"; in the same telegram he demanded that the administration's war ministry assist this delegation "so that it can immediately move food freight to the armies of the West and North"[5]. A week later, on 21 June, Lenin sent Rakovsky a telegram marked "out of all turn" and "with verification of the exact time of delivery," setting a deadline: "The Western army absolutely needs three trainloads of bread within the coming days. I urgently request the most energetic measures to meet this need. The extremity is utmost"[6].