On March 15, 1919, the Samara Gubernia Executive Committee received a telegram: "Samara, to all uyezdsovdepam. In order to restore the destroyed sections of the railway and bridges as soon as possible, as well as in connection with the approach of spring ice drifts, all Soviets are invited to provide the most energetic assistance in organizing the expulsion of the necessary number of workers and carts at the request of the railway administration, which must be carried out urgently on an equal basis with the requirements of the military command. Responsibility for insufficient and untimely delivery of workers and carts is assigned to the volost, uyezd and provincial executive committees. For refusal and non-performance of work, the perpetrators will be tried by the military revolutionary tribunal. Chairman of the Soviet of Workers 'and Peasants' Defense Lenin. For the Markov Drug Company " 1 . What was the reason for these extraordinary measures? Memoirs of contemporaries and archival documents restore the prehistory of the telegram... A difficult situation developed in the Volga region after the expulsion of the White Guards from there in the summer and autumn of 1918. Retreating, they destroyed huge material values. Equipment in factories and factories was removed or rendered unusable, oil tanks and warehouses in Syzran and Samara were destroyed, and public utilities were disabled in cities: water supply, sewerage, and transport. "No thief," S. A. Korotkoi, commissar of the Samara - Zlatoust Railway, noted in his report to the headquarters of the 1st Army, "will turn around as the founders robbed the state premises." 2 Railway transport was in a particularly difficult situation. The connection of the Middle Volga with the country was interrupted, as the bridges near Simbirsk and Syzran, as well as across the Kinel, Samara and Belaya Rivers, were blown up, and the track facilities were rendered unusable. 138 destroyed and burned bridges, many versts of dismantled tr ... Читать далее