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