Reinstitution of the Draft
All-Russia Central Executive Committee, On General Mobilization of Workers and Poor Peasants into the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. May 29, 1918
Original Source: Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii raboche-krestian'skogo pravitel'stva, 1918, No. 41, p. 499.
The Central Executive Committee considers that the advance from a volunteer army to general mobilization of the workers and poorest peasants is imperatively dictated by the general situation in the country, in order to fight for bread and to repulse the counter-revolution, both domestic and external, whose brazenness has grown in conditions of the famine.
It is necessary to go over without delay to compulsory recruitment of one or several age groups. In view of the complexity of the matter and of the difficulties involved in its simultaneous implementation throughout the country, it appears necessary to begin, on the one hand, with the more threatened areas and, on the other, with the main centers of the workers' movement.
Proceeding from the aforesaid, the Central Executive Committee resolves to instruct the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs to draw up, within a week, a compulsory recruitment plan for Moscow, Petrograd and the Don and Kuban areas, within limits and in forms involving minimum interference in the productive and social life of these areas and cities.
The appropriate Soviet institutions are directed to take the most energetic and active part in the implementation of the tasks with which the Military Commissariat has been charged.
Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, Ia. SVERDLOV
Secretary of the Central Executive Committee, AVANESOV
Source: Decrees of the Soviet Government (Moscow: Institute of Marxism-Leninism, 1957), Vol. II, pp. 334-335.