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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: still further away, having to eke out a living by
importing coal from England. The difficulty of transport
alone must have forced the Russians to consider how they
could do away with such anomalies. Their main idea is that
the transport of coal in a modern State is an almost
inexcusable barbarism. They have set themselves, these
ragged engineers, working in rooms which they can hardly
keep above freezing-point and walking home through the
snow in boots without soles, no less a task than the
electrification of the whole of Russia. There is a State
Committee presided over by an extraordinary optimist called
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