p Our road to socialism was a hard and thorny one, but victory was assured because our Party strictly kept to Lenin’s course and ably combined creative development of revolutionary theory with the militant practical activity of the masses. The Leninist torch of revolutionary theory lighted the Party’s path in overcoming all kinds of obstacles of both an internal and external nature. And today it is burning as brightly as ever.

p The history of the fight for the victory of socialism is rich with the experience of the Party’s theoretical as well as practical activities, of its unremitting efforts to keep its ranks ideologically clean and to educate Communists and all the working people in the spirit of selfless devotion to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism. Of great importance was the ideological defeat of two of the most dangerous antiLeninist trends—Trotskyism and Right-wing opportunism. It should be brought home to the present generation that in this long and intense political struggle, during which the 262 fate of the world’s first socialist state hung in the balance, our Party not only came off in the defence of Leninism with flying colours and carried out Lenin’s behests, but advanced the elaboration of scientific theory still further.

p Therefore, those who are attempting to strike off the record the tremendous theoretical activities of the Party and its scientific cadres during the post-Lenin period, and to present this period as one of dead-end dogmatism, are absolutely wide of the mark. To allege this is to fly in the face of the ineluctable facts of historical reality, to be so blind as not to see the wood for the trees. We can say with full justice that Marxist-Leninist social thought has never been in a state of stagnancy, and in everything that has been won and gained in the great construction of socialism a place of honour belongs to social science, to our theoretical cadres.

p Attention first of all should be drawn to the solution of such a complex problem of state significance as the longterm planning of the national economy. As you know, the first long-term plan of economic development was the GOELRO plan of electrification drafted under the guidance of Lenin. The planning of all branches of the national economy and culture for several years ahead, however, required a long period of preparation. The Party was not able to tackle this problem until the tenth year of Soviet rule, when it started with the first five-year plan. The drafting of this plan involved great difficulties not only because it was a new untrodden ground, but because there were elements within the Party who obstructed the drafting and adoption of this plan. As a matter of fact, attitudes towards the drafting of the five-year plan were extremely mixed, ranging from fumbling indecision to open opposition on the part of Left-adventurist and Right-opportunist elements.

p The Party’s theoretical cadres helped it solve on a scientific basis such major problems as the sources and methods of socialist accumulation, priorities and pace of construction, proper proportions and the leading role of heavy industry. The tremendous historical significance of the first five-year plan consists not only in that it brought about profound socio-economic changes in our country, but in that it paved the way to a scientific framing of the principles of socialist planning. It can therefore safely be said that both the first 263 and subsequent five-year plans contributed to the tremendous creative development of Marxist-Leninist science.

p The Soviet method of planning economic development has now been widely recognised in the international arena. It has been adopted in all the socialist countries. What is more, the ideas of the five-year plan have found their way into many countries in Asia and Africa which have thrown off the colonial yoke. Thus, five-year plans have become a motto calling for industrialisation, for the economic and cultural advance and national independence of formerly oppressed nations. Even the imperialist states, whose ideologues and politicians once sneered at the Soviet five-year plans which they described as Bolshevik fantasy and bluff, are now adapting themselves to the conditions of struggle between the two systems and are more and more widely adopting the methods of industrial programming and forecasting and even attempting to draw up their own five-year plans.

p The social sciences have made a valuable contribution to the profound and comprehensive elaboration by the Party of Lenin’s teaching concerning the industrialisation of the country. After coping with the grave aftermath of two wars —the imperialist and civil wars—our country entered a new period, which called for a New Economic Policy in keeping with the grandiose plan for the country’s socialist industrialisation. With Marxist science as its theoretical foundation our Party discovered new objective laws governing the industrial development of a socialist country and worked out and for the first time applied a new approach to their realisation. Those were ways and methods of Soviet industrialisation unknown in the history of any other state. What is the sum and substance of these objective processes?

p First, it is the application of new methods of industrialisation. The great capitalist powers, as we know, started their industrialisation with light industry and then gradually began to set up a heavy industry. In these countries industrialisation took a long time; they were in no hurry, no one threatened them, no one stood in their way. Our country, on the contrary, had to start its industrialisation with the creation of a heavy industry at the quickest possible pace and within the shortest possible time. The Party was well aware that time was short, that the capitalist states at any moment could attack the Soviet country, and, taking 264 advantage of its backwardness, crush the great gains of the revolution. And so it was essential to begin with heavy industry and establish it as quickly as possible in order to strengthen our country’s economic and defensive power. Obviously, this required an immeasurably greater outlay than light industry.

p Second, it is the search for new, hitherto unheard-of sources of accumulation. All the big capitalist powers, as we know, carried out their industrialisation by dishonest methods and means, either by robbing the colonies and dependent countries or by wars, by laying the vanquished nations under contribution. Clearly, these sources were unacceptable in principle for a socialist country. The U.S.S.R. opened a new way to industrialisation, the correctness of which was tested by time and confirmed by events—and that way was internal socialist accumulation.

p Third, it is the discovery of new objective laws governing socialist industrialisation. Capitalist industrialisation was attended by the ruin of a great mass of small commodity producers (peasants, artisans). Not without reason was it said in England in the period of the textile industry’s rapid development that the "sheep now may be said to devour men". In fact, in order to clear pastures for sheep hundreds of thousands of peasants were driven off the land, reduced to pauperism and forced into the factories where they were subjected to uncontrolled exploitation. Beginning from the very first steps of "primary accumulation of capital" through the sweatshop Taylor system down to the modern refined techniques of intensification of labour which turn the human being into an appendage of the machine and cripple him physically and morally, the path of capitalist industrialisation is literally strewn with the bones and drenched with the blood as well as the sweat of the workers. Crises, unemployment and wars have always been an invariable concomitant of capitalist industrialisation, and today, too, the capitalist system is pregnant with them.

p Socialist industrialisation from its very start developed on the basis of free and conscious labour, on the basis of the broad creative initiative of the working class, who had become master of its own life. Socialist industrialisation was directed wholly towards speeding up the development of the productive forces, raising to the utmost the country’s economic potential and the material and cultural level of the masses and creating the material and technical basis for 265 socialism. An important feature of socialist industrialisation is its planned and balanced character.

p Capitalist industrialisation is founded on the uncurbed exploitation of the rural working people by the towns. It creates an unbridgeable gulf between industry and agriculture, shuts itself off from agriculture, leads to the pauperisation and proletarianisation of the peasant masses and swells the reserve army of labour. Socialist industrialisation, on the contrary, does away with every kind of exploitation of the working people; it is founded on the basis of unity and close co-operation with agriculture, it brings industry and agriculture closer together and obliterates the age-old distinctions between town and country. Socialist industrialisation is a massive foundation for the radical transformation of agriculture.

p The social sciences have made a valuable contribution to the elaboration of Lenin’s co-operative plan and to the development of the theory of collectivisation of agriculture. In this respect the Party had no ready-made recipes and it broke new unexplored trails. It is not surprising that in the turning-up of this virgin soil there were no few flaws and crooked furrows. But, having gained control of the movement of the masses and generalised their experience, the Party not only substantiated the correct paths of agriculture’s socialist transformation, but found the best economic forms for its organisation, worked out socialist principles for calculating and remunerating social labour. All this constituted valuable experience for other socialist countries in their efforts to organise large-scale collective farming. The various birds of ill omen may croak as much as they like but they cannot dismiss the vital facts of history. The state farms, the machine and tractor stations and the collective farms—these socialist forms of management in agriculture—have become facts of world significance.

p Another difficult and complex problem of socialist construction solved on a scientific Marxist-Leninist basis was the agrarian and peasant question. Hay was made of the opportunist arguments to the effect that the socialist road of development was alien to the peasantry and that it would inevitably come into conflict with the working class on the main and crucial issue—that of building socialism. Events threw these reactionary dogmas of the anti-Leninist theoreticians onto the rubbish heap. The Soviet peasantry proved 266 by deed that in alliance with the working class and with the assistance of the socialist state it was able successfully to take the socialist path of development and to become a mighty force in the struggle against capitalism. The main result is that the Soviet peasantry has taken its stand for good and all beneath the socialist banner of the working class.

p As a result of the collectivisation of agriculture the former technical, economic and cultural backwardness of the countryside has become a thing of the long-forgotten past. Agricultural production, once carried on in small scattered farms, has become a large-scale, highly organised socialist economy. Social stratification among the peasantry has been done away with for good, and such concepts as "farm labourer", "poor peasant", "middle peasant" and “kulak” have long since disappeared from the life of the countryside. The Soviet peasantry, on the basis of the collectivefarm system, has become a homogeneous socialist class, which, like the workers, is engaged in social economy and is remunerated for its work in accordance with the principles of socialism. The Marxist-Leninist idea of obliterating the distinction between town and country is successfully being put into practice.

p The social sciences have an important part to play in developing and implementing the Leninist theory of cultural revolution. The struggle on this front was most acute. Immediately after the October Socialist Revolution there appeared in the arena of the ideological struggle two opposite trends, both equally disastrous to the building of socialist culture. On the one hand, the echoes of the old ideology of "Russian exceptionalism" and "Slavophil inviolability" rose to a wolf’s howl, on the other, came the bad smell of “Left” revolutionism—"down with everything", "smash it all up", and on the empty ruins set up a “new” puny, ideologically disarmed culture shorn of the best traditions of succession of the generations.

p These dangerous deviations were strongly opposed by Lenin. He showed that proletarian culture could arise only on the basis of all that was best in the accumulated experience of mankind. To preserve the precious heritage of past generations, stripped of everything that was reactionary in it and that served only the exploiters, to make this heritage the property of the masses of present and future 267 generations—such was the goal which Lenin set before the Party. Our Party did not retreat an inch from Lenin’s behests. It did everything within its power to make the Soviet working man a worthy heir, careful guardian and disseminator of the great legacy of human culture. A great role in this was played not only by the Communists, but by the live creative effect of Marxist-Leninist dialectics and its revolutionary achievement.

p On the basis of society’s vital needs our Party made every effort to abolish illiteracy and semi-literacy in the shortest possible time, to introduce universal primary education and then start on the introduction of universal secondary education and enable every Soviet citizen to realise his right to a higher education. The greatest achievement of the cultural revolution, however, was the training and education of ideologically steeled cadres from among the working class and the peasantry capable of dealing with the major problems of Party and state activities and whom the Party equipped with a knowledge of the laws of social development and with a profound understanding of the sum and substance of the new socialist order. One of the most important results of the cultural revolution was the creation of a large army of Soviet socialist intellectuals.

p On the basis of Marxist-Leninist science the Party discovered the general laws of development of socialist economy and culture and administered a severe ideological defeat to our opponents, both to the advocates of ascetic "barrack socialism" who maintain that socialism should be built on material austerity, on the petty-bourgeois principles of egalitarianism, and to the adherents of a consumers’, vulgarised socialism who demand wide scope for personal accumulation, luxury and unlimited consumption.

p Neither can we pass over in silence such a complex problem of social development as the national problem, to the scientific elaboration of which the Party’s theoretical cadres made an important contribution which helped to solve the national question in the U.S.S.R. The Party undeviatingly pursued a Leninist nationalities policy, thus ensuring the burgeoning of the economy and culture of the national republics, as a result of which the factual as well as legal inequality of the nations of former tsarist Russia was liquidated in the shortest space of time. The economic, political and cultural efflorescence of the formerly backward and 268 oppressed peoples took place on the basis of intensive socialist industrialisation and the victory of the collective-farm system and the cultural revolution. The correctness of the Marxist-Leninist postulate concerning the transition to socialism by a path that avoided the capitalist phase of development is exemplified by the numerous nationalities that inhabit the Soviet Union. The time when discord and national enmity reigned among these peoples has sunk into oblivion; the very character of all the Soviet nations has undergone a radical change: the feeling of mutual distrust and enmity has given place to a feeling of internationalism, to mutual support and friendship, to a real brotherly cooperation among all the peoples within the system of a united multinational Soviet socialist state.

p Developing the theoretical principles of Marxism- Leninism and leaning on the great gains of socialism, our Party, its theoretical cadres, framed and formulated that great charter of the epoch—the Constitution of the land of socialism. The gains of the revolutionary people, who had built socialism, were solemnly proclaimed for the first time in this historic document, namely: the right to work, the right to education, the right to rest and a secure old age. The rights of the working people are guaranteed by the whole essence of the socialist system and its rapidly growing productive forces, by all the gains of Soviet power.

p The creative development of the ideas of MarxismLeninism is exemplified in the forms and methods of state and Party activities worked out in detail by our theoretical cadres. This was an entirely new field for us. At the dawn of Soviet rule Lenin pointed out that the building of a new type of state, the recruitment of the broad masses into the business of running the state and the creation of a smoothworking machinery of state was an extremely difficult and complex job which would take a long time. It will be no exaggeration to say that in the solution of this tremendous problem a great role was played by the Party’s theoretical activities. In the words of Lenin, this was a truly creative approach, one in which we had made the fullest use of Marxism as a guide to action.

p Bourgeois ideologues like to burrow into our history, and deliberately picture it as a pattern of mistakes and blunders, which they magnify in every way. But history knows 9nly too well that the bourgeoisie has made and is still 269 making far more mistakes and committing far more stupidities than the proletariat can afford to do. "If we get down to brass tacks, however," said Lenin, "has it ever happened in history that a new mode of production has taken root immediately,, without a long succession of setbacks, blunders and relapses?”  [269•* 

p Historical experience testifies that the strategy of the Marxist-Leninist parties worked out on the basis of a theoretical analysis of the main tendencies of social development conforms most fully and accurately to the basic trends of world development. This course is calculated for a long period of time and is less exposed to possible errors. As regards tactics, the forms and methods of the Party’s activities at various stages of the revolutionary struggle, these are extremely mobile and less insured against mistakes and shortcomings; it is precisely here, on this knotty point, that miscalculations and failures are possible. Objectively speaking, mistakes by a revolutionary party are possible not only in major transformative processes, but in the daily round of practical activities.

p No revolutionary party is guaranteed against mistakes and faults. This is quite understandable, since, in its activities aimed at remodelling the old world, the party has to take into account a multitude of the most diverse factors, such as the balance of political forces, the level of consciousness and temper of the masses, the adjustment of foreign policy to swiftly changing conditions, and so on. Mistakes and shortcomings are a consequence of the complex contradictions and obstacles which have had to be overcome along the path of the social forces. It is entirely a question of the nature and extent of this or that error, the gravity of its consequences, its timely uncovering and rectification and efforts to avoid a repetition. Not to be afraid of admitting mistakes, of boldly laying them bare and rectifying them —these are signs of a party’s maturity, strength and fighting fitness.

p The activities of our Party suffered at a definite stage from similar shortcomings and mistakes. We shall not go into the details here, since this question has been fully and adequately dealt with in the Party’s published documents concerning the personality cult, voluntarism and subjectivism. These 270 phenomena, which are alien to Marxism-Leninism, can in no sense be regarded as deriving from the nature of the socialist system. They did not and could not alter the character of the Soviet socialist system. Therefore, it cannot be regarded as correct, either factually or theoretically, when the over-emphasis laid on shortcomings in some historical publications and works of fiction overshadow the heroic struggle and selfless labour of the Soviet millions who have built socialism, their creative enthusiasm and activity.

p In this connection it is appropriate to mention the impassioned utterance of that outstanding proletarian revolutionary Clara Zetkin, who, defending the party of Lenin against the vile attacks of the bourgeois ideologues and renegades, flung out the challenging words, which have such a proud, fresh ring to this day: "Their mistakes and the shortcomings of their policy will be reduced by historical perspective to microscopic dimensions. They will become like the trees of an avenue that lose themselves in the distant horizon. But the whole straight line of their actions will stand forth as if hewn out of rock. The Bolsheviks as a whole are historically deathless already at the present time. This significance of theirs is ineradicable."

p The entire path of progress of the Soviet state is one of impressive grandeur. As a result of the Party’s gigantic efforts there was forged that insuperable moral and political unity of the Soviet people which weathered the severest trials during the years of the Great Patriotic War. A brilliant example of Leninist skill in scientifically substantiated strategic action was the creation of the anti-Hitler coalition, which was an important factor in the victory over fascism. We won not only by the material might of our country, by the power and art of the military operations of the Soviet Army and its generals, but by the power of our ideological weapon, by the people’s steadfastness and utter dedication to Marxism-Leninism.

p Marxist-Leninist theory and all the social sciences helped our Party to frame and adopt its Programme of Communist Construction. Without going into a detailed analysis of this document we can say with full confidence that its main objectives are formulated with true Leninist accuracy of scientific prevision aimed at creating the material and technical basis of communism, at forming communist relations of production, at educating the new generation of builders of 271 communism. Can anything more lofty be thought of for our and for future generations!

p The building of communism in the U.S.S.R. is a new historic step towards the revolutionary transformation of the world, a landmark in the development of human society. That most humane of words—Communism—has taken its place firmly in the lives of all nations and states; it has become a concrete programme of action for the Soviet millions, and has shifted from the realm of theory to the solid ground of practical deeds. The building of communism means not only a radical reorganisation of the world, but a further great development of the theory of scientific communism, a practical test of the correctness of MarxistLeninist teaching.

The Communist Party works out its strategy and tactics and frames its policy on strictly scientific ground. The Party’s practical activities are based, not on the subjectivist wishes of outstanding personalities and their intuitive impulses, but on the objective laws of social development, on a profound study of the real needs of society’s developing material and spiritual life. The Party will continue along Lenin’s tried and tested line, developing, enriching and systematically putting into practice the theory of scientific communism. This is guaranteed by the 24th Congress of the C.P.S.U., which has raised the role of Marxist-Leninist theory to such a commanding eminence. Never before have representatives of the social sciences faced such grandiose and complex problems as they do now. And on how they fulfil their civic duty largely depends the progress of society and the pace of our forward movement towards communism.