p Report Made at the Plenary Meeting of the CC CPSU October 30, 1968

p Comrades, 

p The Soviet people, implementing the decisions of the 23rd Party Congress, have achieved great success in economic and cultural construction. Over the period from 1966 to 1968 the industrial production of the USSR will have increased by nearly 30 per cent. More than one thousand big industrial enterprises and projects will have been put into operation. The heavy industry has been further developed. The food and light industries have considerably increased their gross output. A number of urgent technical problems have been solved. Agriculture has made new steps forward in its development.

p Over these years important socio-economic measures have also been carried out, including measures such as raising the minimum wage, regulating wages for workers in a number of branches and professions, increasing pensions, and others. As a result, the real incomes of the population in per capita terms will have risen over the 1966-68 period by more than 20 per cent, or 6.4 per cent on the annual average.

p Public education and culture are developing successfully. Thirty-seven higher educational establishments have been opened in our country, the number of students at higher educational establishments has grown by 600,000, and the number of pupils at secondary special educational establishments by over 600,000. There has been further development of vocational education and also of general- secondary education. Big new successes have been achieved by Soviet scientists and by our science as a whole.

p A genuine countrywide movement has now unfolded embracing all the people. We are approaching one of the most significant dates in the history of mankind, the centenary of the birth of V. I. Lenin, the great thinker and revolutionary, the leader and teacher of the Soviet people and the working people of the whole world. The workers in industry and agriculture, transport and building, people of all callings and ages, are preparing their labour gifts for that day. Socialist competition on the occasion of Lenin’s centenary to fulfil the five-year plan by November 7, 1970 has spread throughout the entire country, involving the entire Soviet people. Permit me in the name of our plenary meeting to convey warm greetings to that splendid movement and to wish the toilers of town and countryside great succeses in socialist competition.

The facts and figures of our growth, of the great labour upsurge in the country, provide a convincing expression of the high moral fibre of the Soviet people, their unshakable loyalty to the great cause of communism, their profound understanding of and support for the policy and practical activities of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.