227 
According to data furnished up to April, 1917, eighty-one such 
institutions were in existence at that time on the western front 
alone.?° 
WORK IN THE ARMY 
Zemstvo Retail Stores. 
At the beginning of the summer of 1915 the Warsaw committee 
of the Zemstvo Union suggested that retail stores should be opened 
at the front to supply the soldiers with all that they required. Prices 
charged in the area adjoining the front were exorbitant and often 
the most important articles were lacking. 
The field detachments, acting on their own initiative, succeeded in 
opening small retail stores in’ connection with bathhouses, and can- 
teens. These first experiments showed, on the one hand, the vastness 
of the demand and the importance of satisfying it; on the other 
hand it also revealed the fact that it would be impossible to develop 
the network of retail stores unless the whole organization was put on 
a sound foundation, with a regular purchasing machinery and suffi- 
cient funds behind it. The Zemstvo Union, however, conducted fur- 
ther experiments; thus, in the area between the Vistula and the 
Niemen fifteen retail stores were gradually opened, at some of which 
provisions were sold to the local population, whilst others supplied 
the wants of the troops. The retail stores of the latter kind were at 
first opened at distances of five to seven miles behind the front lines, 
but later on they were moved closer up. 
The first retail stores were immensely popular and successful, but 
were able to work only with interruptions. The Warsaw depots 
of the Zemstvo Union were not in a position to satisfy the demands 
of the retail stores scattered over vast distances, whilst the organ- 
izers themselves lacked sufficient funds to make independent pur- 
chases in the neighboring markets. Sometimes the stores would have 
to close down entirely. In the late autumn of 1915 the Union’s com- 
mittee of the western front decided to reorganize the business on a 
more solid basis. The military authorities, whose opinion was asked, 
showed themselves very favorably disposed toward the new scheme 
and 1,000,000 rubles were appropriated for this purpose from army 
funds. It was decided to open two hundred retail stores and to enlist 
the services of the employees of the Moscow consumers’ coGperative 
societies. 
8 Ibid., Nos. 58-60, p. 100.