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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: in Russia. Russia produced practically no manufactured
goods (70 per cent. of her machinery she received from
abroad), but great quantities of food. The blockade isolated
her. By the blockade I do not mean merely the childish
stupidity committed by ourselves, but the blockade, steadily
increasing in strictness, which began in August, 1914,
and has been unnecessarily prolonged by our stupidity. The
war, even while for Russia it was not nominally a blockade,
was so actually. The use of tonnage was perforce restricted
to the transport of the necessaries of war, and these were
narrowly defined as shells, guns and so on, things which do
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