licht how it was that
their army still contained skilled workmen when one of the objects of
industrial conscription was to get the skilled workmen back into the
factories. He said: "We have an accurate census of the army, and when we
get asked for skilled workmen for such and such a factory, they go there
knowing that they still belong to the army."

That, of course, is the army point of view, and indicates one of the
main squabbles which industrial conscription has produced. Trotsky would
like the various armies to turn into units of a territorial militia, and
at the same time to be an important part of the labor organization
of each district. His opponents do not regard the labor armies as a
permanent manifestation, and many have gone so far as to say that
the productivity of labor in one of these armies is lower than among
ordinary workmen. Both sides produce figures on this point, and Trotsky
goes so far as to say that if his opponents are right, then not only
are labor armies damned, but also the whole principle of industrial
conscription. "If compulsory labor-independently of social condition-is
unproductive, that is a condemnation not of the labor armies, but of
industrial conscription in general, and with it of the whole Soviet
system, the further development of which is unthinkable except on a
basis of universal industrial conscription."

But, of course, the question of the permanence of the labor armies is
not so important as the question of getting the skilled workers back
to the factories. The comparative success or failure of soldiers or
mobilized peasants in cutting wood is quite irrelevant to this recovery
of the vanished workmen. And that recovery will take time, and will be
entirely useless unless it is possible to feed these workers when they
have been collected. There have already been several attempts, not
wholly successful, to collect the straying workers of particular
industries. Thus, after the freeing of the oil-wells from the Whites,
there was a general mobilization of naphtha workers. Many of these had
bolted on or after the arrival of Krasnov or Denikin and gone far into
Central Russia, settling where they could. So months passed before the
Red Army definitely pushed the area of civil war beyond the oil-wells,
that many of these refugees had taken new root and were unwilling to
return. I believe, that in spite of the mobilization, the oil-wells
are still short of men. In the coal district