that the Trades Unions should be invited to protect the
interests of the conscripted. Finally, this Conference approved the idea
of using the already existing military organization for carrying out a
labor census of the Red Army, and for the turning over to labor of parts
of the army during demobilization, but opposed the idea of giving the
military organization the work of labor registration and industrial
conscription in general.

On January 22, 1920, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, after
prolonged discussion of Trotsky's rough memorandum, finally adopted
and published a new edition of the "theses," expanded, altered, almost
unrecognizable, a reasoned body of theory entirely different from
the bundle of arrows loosed at a venture by Trotsky. They definitely
accepted the principle of industrial conscription, pointing out the
immediate reasons for it in the fact that Russia cannot look for much
help from without and must somehow or other help herself.

Long before the All-Russian Congress of the Communist Party approved the
theses of the Committee, one form of industrial conscription was already
being tested at work. Very early in January, when the discussion on the
subject was at its height, the Soviet of the Third Army addressed itself
to the Council of Defense of the Republic with an invitation to make use
of this army (which at least for the moment had finished its military
task) and to experiment with it as a labor army. The Council of Defense
agreed. Representatives of the Commissariats of Supply, Agriculture,
Ways and Communications, Labor and the Supreme Council of Public Economy
were sent to assist the Army Soviet. The army was proudly re-named "The
First Revolutionary Army of Labor," and began to issue communiques
"from the Labor front," precisely like the communiques of an army in the
field. I translate as a curiosity the first communique issued by a Labor
Army's Soviet:

"Wood prepared in the districts of Ishim, Karatulskaya, Omutinskaya,
Zavodoutovskaya, Yalutorovska, Iushaly, Kamuishlovo, Turinsk, Altynai,
Oshtchenkovo, Shadrinsk, 10,180 cubic sazhins. Working days, 52,651.
Taken to the railway stations, 5,334 cubic sazhins. Working days on
transport, 22,840. One hundred carpenters detailed for the Kizelovsk
mines. One hundred carpenters detailed for the bridge at Ufa. One
engineer specialist detailed to the Government Council of Public Economy
for repairing the mills of Chelyabinsk G