THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE 257
posters and handbills were sent to the local committees, to be displayed
 in public places. Members of the local committees of the Union
 delivered lectures on the same topic in the rural communities and
assisted peasants in writing letters and sending parcels to prisoners
of war.
Besides assisting direct individual help by relatives of the prisoners,
 the Union organized collective relief by supplying entire
camps of prisoners of war with provisions. Donations for this purpose
 received by the Central Committee of the Union never reached
a large amount, and the scale of the relief remained inadequate. Beginning
 with May, 1916, the United Organization for the Relief of
Prisoners of War obtained a monthly grant of 450,000 rubles
through the Committee of the Empress Alexandra; and later the
grant was increased to 700,000 rubles. From this time onward it
became possible to forward supplies on a much larger scale. Owing
to the embargoes on certain commodities, the Union organized the
purchase and dispatch of food parcels and other articles for Russian
 prisoners of war at The Hague, and other neutral cities. The
Union received hundreds of orders every day for packages to be
forwarded from neutral countries, this being the only way of supplying
 the prisoners with such articles as sugar, condensed milk,
canned meat and fish, fresh bread, etc. But so many were the restrictions
 and prohibitions in the way of the relief operations that it
seemed at times almost impossible to do anything. The military
censorship delayed scores of thousands of letters addressed to prisoners
 of war or their relatives. It was forbidden to give the home
address of the prisoner or his military unit; the enemy authorities,
on the other hand, who obtained these data from each prisoner as a
matter of registration routine, failed to use them to trace the prisoner
 and to deliver to him letters or packages. The result was that
large numbers of letters and packages would be returned. As stated
above, there was an embargo on the export from Russia of many
commodities, and in the spring of 1916 there was even a period when
it was forbidden to purchase such articles abroad (this was done to
prevent the decline of the exchange of the ruble).
Although the prisoners were in great need of reading matter,
only schoolbooks might be sent to them, and even these only if published
 previous to 1912. No such books, however, were to be found in
the market, and as for collecting second-hand books, this would have