p Comrades, several decades separate us from the unforgettable years when for the first time in man’s history we in our country started to build a new, socialist system in the countryside. But no matter how much time and how many events have passed, and how many generations have succeeded one another, there will never be erased from the peoples’ mind the memory of the deeds of those energetic pioneers who worked to remodel village life, those first members of the communes, rural Communists, YCL members, schoolteachers, rural correspondents and village librarians, those 25,000 factory workers who went to the countryside in response to the Party’s call, the workers of political departments at machine and tractor stations and state farms.

p Those were the heroes of a great battle. That was a time of sharp class struggle by the proletariat of town and country against socialism’s numerous enemies.

p In the process of collectivisation the Party had to break down the furious resistance of the kulaks and other class enemies and to wage a hard fight against the Trotskyites and Right-wing opportunists.

p Now all this is history, and socialism has moved far ahead. We now have with us millions of people who are building socialism in different continents, and we are grateful to them for their support and friendship, for the interest they are showing in our work and our experience.

p We speak of this open-heartedly, with full sincerity. Soviet men and women in the course of their socialist history have come to know the true meaning of single combat against international capital, have learned the price of friendship, of that common touch which makes the hardest road seem easier and shorter.

p At all stages of the struggle for the socialist remaking of the countryside the Communist Party has been guided by Lenin’s cooperative plan.

p Our Party realised only too well the difficulties that stood in the way of collectivisation, above all those represented by the country’s technical and economic backwardness and the 233 private-owner mentality of the peasant. It also took into account the difficult situation in which our country, at that time the only country of proletarian dictatorship in the world, was placed. The capitalist encirclement and the constant threat of a military attack called for socialist transformations being carried out in the shortest possible span of time.

p The Party’s choice of the path of collectivisation was no accidental one, no random one. It was based on scientific ground and was ripe historically. It could not be ignored or evaded.

p The years of collectivisation became for the workers and peasants a genuine school of political training and class wisdom. It was brought home to the peasantry that it could achieve its age-old dream of a free and happy life only in union with the working class, in rallying round the Leninist Party. (Stormy, prolonged applause.)

p In the process of collective-farm development we did not avoid some mistakes. But these were the mistakes of quest, errors due to lack of experience. The Party itself fearlessly uncovered these errors, openly told the people about them and rectified them. Unfortunately, there are still people about who love to exaggerate on the cost of this big revolutionary job.

p The Communist Party and the Soviet people are at one in their assessment of the collective-farm system. (Applause.) The collective-farm system is our great historic gain. (Stormy applause.)

p The working class played an outstanding role in the victory of the collective-farm system. It provided the peasantry with tractors, combines, lorries and other equipment; it gave active support to the organisation and consolidation of the collective farms. Its best representatives, sent to the countryside by the Party, helped the peasants to organise the first collective farms. Many of them made collective-farm organisation the business of their lives.

p A big contribution to the socialist remaking of the countryside was made by the state-farm workers. They showed an example of large-scale farming. Today the state farms play a substantial role in providing the country with agricultural produce.

p The activities of our Soviet intelligentsia have earned the gratitude of the whole country. Thousands of specialists— 234 teachers, doctors, agronomists, land-management experts and mechanics—went into the villages to work and took an active part in establishing socialist relations there. Intellectuals in the field of creative work helped the Party and the people in the great socialist remaking of the village. Suffice it to mention Virgin Soil Upturned by Mikhail Sholokhov, Slabs by Fyodor Panferov, Start by Vladimir Stavsky, and many other works.

p Quite a few good books about the socialist village and its heroes have been written in recent years, too. We hope that our writers and art workers will create new vivid, fullscale works dealing profoundly with the processes that are under way in the contemporary socialist village.

p Revolutionary cooperation between the working class, the peasantry and the Soviet intelligentsia ensured the triumph of socialism, the radical transformation of the material and technical basis of agriculture and the entire life of the peasants.

p With the collective-farm system the peasant received a new life, a life free from exploitation, poverty, and constant fear of the future, fear for himself, for his family, for his farm. People of the old generation remember how in the past the peasant was oppressed, illiterate, disenfranchised and defenceless, left alone to face the elemental forces of nature and all kinds of hardships.

p The collective farm relieved the peasant of this heavy burden of the past and gave him a secure place in life, made him master of his own destiny. And this, comrades, is a great thing! (Prolonged applause.)

p The Great Patriotic War was a severe trial for the young collective-farm system. During the war the collective-farm peasantry demonstrated its supreme devotion to the Motherland, to the collective-farm system, and the collective farms were a mighty force of Soviet society.

p Bourgeois politicians and pseudo-theoreticians never tire of slandering the collective-farm system and praising private enterprise in every way. But for all their artifices, the bourgeois propagandists are unable to conceal the monstrous expropriation, pauperisation and ruin to which millions of peasant households and farms in the capitalist countries are subjected.

p The postwar development of capitalist agriculture conclusively confirms the words of the great Lenin to the effect 235 that "capitalism raises the level of agricultural technique and advances it, but it cannot do so except by ruining, depressing and crushing the mass of small producers".  [235•1 

p Here are a few of the relevant facts. In the United States, for example, 2,600,000 farms, or 46 per cent of the country’s total, were ruined in the last 18 years. In the Federal Republic of Germany during approximately the same period the number of farms dropped by nearly 600,000 or 26 per cent. In Italy an average of 67,000 farms were ruined annually between 1961 and 1967. As a rule, the ruined farmers become farm labourers or swell the ranks of the unemployed.

p Is it this lot that bourgeois propagandists wish our peasantry? For the Soviet peasantry the question about the ways of developing the countryside was solved long ago, solved finally and irrevocably. (Applause.) Our peasantry seeks no other way and does not need it. (Prolonged applause.)

p The tremendous historical role of the collective-farm system in the destinies of the Soviet peasantry and of our entire country cannot be overestimated.

p Politically, the collective-farm system strengthened the Soviet state and its main basis, the union of the workers and the peasants, and ensured real conditions for the participation of the peasants in the management, of social production and in decisions on general affairs of state.

p Economically, the collective-farm system placed at the service of socialism and communism the advantages of large-scale production and made it possible to develop agriculture on a modern industrial basis.

p Socially, the collective-farm system not only delivered the working peasant from exploitation and poverty, but also made it possible to establish in the countryside a new system of social relations which lead to the complete obliteration of class distinctions in Soviet society.

The ideas of the great Lenin on cooperation, the policy of the Party in solving the peasant question have fully withstood the test of time. The experience of the USSR and other socialist countries demonstrates with utmost clarity that the building of socialism in the countryside is the peasantry’s only way to happiness, is the basis for the well-being of all the working people. (Prolonged applause.)