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 particularly clear expression of the peasants' disbelief in our ability to draw up a proper economic plan. This belief is clearly at the bottom of such questions as, 'Comrade Gusev, have you ever done any plowing?' or 'Comrade Orator, do you know anything about peasant work?' Disbelief in the townsman who understands nothing about peasants is natural to the peasant, and we shall have to conquer it, to get through it, to get rid of it by showing the peasant, with a clear plan in our hands that he can understand, that we are not altogether fools in this matter and that we understand more than he does." He then sets out the argument which he himself had found successful in persuading the peasants to do things the reward for which would not be obvious the moment they were done. He says, "I compared our State economy to a colossal building with scores of stories and tens of thousands of rooms. The whole building has been half smashed; in places the roof has tumbled down, the beams have rotted, the ceilings are tumbling, the drains and water pipes are burst; the stoves are falling to pieces, the partitions are shattered, and, finally, the walls and foundations are unsafe and the whole building is threatened with collapse. I asked, how, must one set about the repair of this building? With what kind of economic plan? To this question the inhabitants of