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 of all Russia, but a programme of the struggle before
them in actually getting their feet clear of the morass of industrial
decay in which they are at present involved. Such a programme has
actually been decided upon-a programme the definite object of which
is to reconcile the workers to work not simply hand to mouth, each for
himself, but to concentrate first on those labors which will eventually
bring their reward in making other labors easier and improving the
position as a whole.

Early this year a comparatively unknown Bolshevik called Gusev, to whom
nobody had attributed any particular intelligence, wrote, while busy on
the staff of an army on the southeast front, which was at the time being
used partly as a labor army, a pamphlet which has had an extraordinary
influence in getting such a programme drawn up. The pamphlet is based
on Gusev's personal observation both of a labor army at work and of
the attitude of the peasant towards industrial conscription. It was
extremely frank, and contained so much that might have been used by
hostile critics, that it was not published in the ordinary way but
printed at the army press on the Caucasian front and issued exclusively
to members of the Communist Party. I got hold of a copy of this
pamphlet through a friend. It is called "Urgent Questions of Economic
Construction." Gusev sets out in detail the sort of opposition he had
met, and says: "The Anarchists, Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks
have a clear, simple economic plan which the great masses can
understand: 'Go about your own business and work freely for yourself in
your own place.' They have a criticism of labor mobilizations equally
clear for the masses. They say to them, 'They are putting Simeon in
Peter's place, and Peter in Simeon's. They are sending the men of
Saratov to dig the ground in the Government of Stavropol, and the
Stavropol men to the Saratov Government for the same purpose.' Then
besides that there is 'nonparty' criticism:

"'When it is time to sow they will be shifting muck, and when it is time
to reap they will be told to cut timber.' That is a p