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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: some factories, like the Votkinsky, have been purposely
ruined by the Whites, in others the lathes and other
machinery for building and repairing locomotives are worn
out, many of the skilled engineers were killed in the war with
Germany, many others in defending the revolution, and it
will be long before it will be possible to restore to the
workmen or to the factories the favorable material
conditions of 1912-13. Thus the main fact in the present
crisis is that Russia possesses one-fifth of the number of
locomotives which in 1914 was just sufficient to maintain
her railway system in a state of efficiency which to English
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