WORK OF THE UNION 
Committees of the Front. 
3G 
With the number of the zemstvo institutions in the armies in- 
creasing rapidly, there arose the need of combining them for pur- 
poses of more efficient supply and leadership. In November, 1914, 
the front representatives of the Zemstvo Union met at Warsaw and 
adopted certain recommendations for the creation of a front com- 
mittee to take charge of all zemstvo institutions in the war zone. 
The Central Committee approved the proposal and appointed one 
of its members as head of the new organization. Soon, however, it 
became clear that the Warsaw committee would not be able to direct 
efficiently the zemstvo institutions in Galicia. The remoteness and 
peculiar conditions of that theater of war demanded an independent 
organization on the spot. The result was that in J anuary, 1915, a 
special committee of the Union was organized in the city of Lvov, 
and was known as the southwestern committee, as distinguished from 
the northwestern, which continued to function at Warsaw. Later, 
when the northwestern front was divided into a northern and west- 
ern front, a similar division was established in the Warsaw com- 
mittee. There were thus formed three zemstvo committees of the 
front: the western, at Minsk ; the northern, at Pskov; and the south- 
western, at Lvov (transferred later on to Kiev). When Turkey be- 
gan hostilities a similar front committee was organized at Tiflis, and 
when Rumania joined the Allies, one was also established at the 
Rumanian front. 
Within the larger committees of the western front this process of 
differentiation continued as their activities and the number of their 
institutions kept expanding. In the latter half of 1915 & special 
commissioner of the Zemstvo Union, with a limited regional adminis- 
trative staff, was attached to the headquarters of each army at the 
front. On the western front, there were five such commissioners and 
four on the southwestern. In this way the Zemstvo Union was en- 
abled to keep in close touch with the actual needs of each of the 
principal subdivisions of the army and, thanks to its permanent 
contact with headquarters, it was in a position also to satisfy more 
efficiently the needs of the various units within each army. The 
committees of the front were confronted with the following three 
principal problems: (1) how to satisfy the immediate needs of the 
army ; (2) how to satisfy the needs of the laborers employed in dig-