p Comrades, fifty years ago, when putting up for broad discussion the GOELRO plan, history’s first state plan for economic development, V. I. Lenin said that when the Party and the Soviet Government came to concentrate on the country’s economic development that-period would be the happiest epoch. He urged that congresses and conferences should be turned into "bodies that will verify our economic achievements, bodies in which we can really learn the business of economic development".  [358•1 

p Our Party congresses have in fact become such bodies in the full sense of the word! As Lenin had predicted, economics is the main policy for the Party and the Soviet state, a policy on whose success decisively depends the advance of Soviet society towards communism and the consolidation of the international positions of our socialist power.

In reporting on the work done in this most important direction, the Party’s Central Committee has good ground to say that the Soviet people have brought the Eighth FiveYear Plan to a fitting completion, thereby taking another major step forward in building the material and technical basis of communism, in strengthening the country’s might, and in raising the people’s living standards. (Applause.)