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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: in their own material conditions. Industrial conscription
cannot be enforced in Russia unless there is among the
conscripted themselves an understanding, although a
resentful understanding, of its necessity. The Russians have
not got an army of Martians to enforce effort on an alien
people. The army and the people are one. "We are bound
to admit," says Trotsky, "that no wide industrial mobilization
will succeed, if we do not capture all that is honorable,
spiritual in the peasant working masses in explaining our
plan." And the plan that he referred to was not the grandiose
(but obviously sensible) plan for the eventual electrification
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