Sergey Kazakov, Director of the Industrial Development Fund of the Chelyabinsk Region, declares that the robotisation of industry is being held back by business itself:

"We had a case where a loader robot was installed at one of the enterprises. On the second day it broke down. They began to investigate. It turned out that the workers themselves had switched it off, for fear of being replaced by robots."

This reminded me of the story of my beloved Konstantin Levin, who longed with all his heart to improve peasant life and perfect the ways of the countryside, and who discovered one day that the feeding racks were broken and had not been mended since winter. The threshing machine, too, was broken; the peasants simply did not care for the contraption. And the carpenter who was supposed to repair the threshing machine was mending harrows that had been broken since Shrovetide. Then the steward reported that clover had been sown not on 20 desyatinas, as Levin wanted, but on only 6. The oats, not turned over in time, had sprouted ahead of schedule. Clover seed is not to be crushed when sown, and so it would not come up as it should. And all the other plans and calculations of the master for the future came to nothing and would not fall into place.

"...there was repeated that eternal slovenliness of husbandry against which he had struggled for so many years with all his might." And every new steward and every peasant repeated the same thing: whatever you did, however you tried, the result would be "as God grants". Levin found all this vexing, and he understood that the peasants were not yet ready for freedom, and that time and again, not out of malice but all the same deliberately, they spoiled the work, even as they promised to do their best "as for a own father".

Nothing in Russia has changed since the days of Leo Tolstoy, nothing