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p Following the triumph of the Great October Revolution, the youth of the first country to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat actively joined in building the new society.

p In reply to the appeal of the Communist Party, millions of young men and women went forth to build factories and plants, the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station, and numerous new towns.

p This enthusiasm for labour was most visibly expressed on a mass scale in socialist competition which, in turn, became the most important instrument for encouraging this enthusiasm. "It is only socialism,” Lenin wrote, "which ... by abolishing the enslavement of the people, for the first time opens the way for competition on a really mass scale.”  [37•1  He pointed out that "far from extinguishing competition, socialism, on the contrary, for the first time creates the opportunity for employing it on a really wide and on a really mass scale".  [37•2 

p Socialist competition soon assumed a mass scale. The first important milestones in its progress were "shock work”, the Stakhanov movement, labour roll-calls, socialist pledges, and front-line teams during the Great Patriotic War.

p The highest form of emulation is the movement to promote a communist attitude to labour, which was initiated in the late 1950s. This movement combines into one the struggle 38 for achievement in production with the promotion of a higher ideological, moral and cultural levels.

p Soviet youth actively participates in all labour movements. Today more than 40 per cent of Soviet young people are engaged in the country’s economy. They are particularly numerous in the modern fields of production which require a high level of general and technical education. By the beginning of the Ninth Five-Year Plan, young people accounted for 66 per cent of all chemical workers; 65 per cent of fitters and 70 per cent of turners.

p The national economy annually absorbs at least 3 million young workers, collective farmers, specialists and office employees. Naturally enough, the advancement of communism greatly depends on the participation of young people in labour and their cultural, professional, ideological and moral background.

p Continuing the glorious traditions of shock teams, the Komsomol organises youth collectives in the most important and difficult sectors of production. These teams initiate socialist competition among young people.

p Getting them to serve as patrons over major projects is a means of involving youth in economic issues; it helps to teach them how to carry out responsible assignments.

p In the Report of the CC CPSU to the 24th Party Congress Leonid Brezhnev gave a high appraisal of the activity of Soviet youth on the labour front under the leadership of the Leninist Young Communist League. "It would be hard to name a sector of economic and cultural development,” he said, "where the energy, creative initiative and ardour of Komsomol members have not been displayed. Organisation of Komsomol shock building projects, team contests of skill by young workers, students’ building detachments, youth production brigades, and summer work and recreation camps are the concrete and vital tasks being accomplished by the Komsomol, which is the leader of Soviet young people.”  [38•1 

p During the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1966-1970) young workers made a great contribution to the construction of the material and technical basis of communism.

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p The Komsomol organisations sent more than 350,000 young volunteers to the country’s most important projects. They built 15 blast and open-hearth furnaces, 13 rolling mills, 20 agglomerate factories and coke batteries, nearly a thousand kilometres of electric transmission lines, 3,000 kilometres of railways and more than 8,000 kilometres of gas and oil mains.

p The collectives of the All-Union Komsomol shock projects, such as the Cherepovets Metallurgical Combine, the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station, the Almalyk Chemical Works, and the Khrebtovaya-Ust-Ilim railway, became real schools of advanced methods and communist youth education.

p Many interesting movements were born and much initiative shown during the Eighth Five-Year Plan. The young workers of Gorky, for instance, launched a campaign under the slogan "No laggards in our ranks!”. The aim was to give a helping hand to the novices in production who were not sufficiently active in public life, so that they would catch up with the advanced workers, acquire and subsequently raise professional qualification and develop an urge for making innovations in engineering. The results were quick to come. In the very first year the number of workers who failed to fulfil their production quotas in the region’s enterprises was reduced by more than a third. The thirst for knowledge grew and many more young workers joined evening classes. Thousands of them enrolled in schools of advanced methods and learned new professions.

p The young workers of the Dynamo Plant in Moscow initiated a movement for personal plans of higher labour productivity. Soon the movement spread to other enterprises. On the eve of the 24th Party Congress the young workers of the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine sponsored a new movement—emulation contracts between advanced and lagging teams. "Catch up with us!" was the slogan.

p The emulation of Komsomol-youth collectives assumed a particularly mass scale on the eve of Lenin’s centenary. A good illustration of this was the work of the Komsomolyouth collectives in the Tushino District of Moscow.

p There are nearly 300 youth collectives in the district. The Komsomol-youth team led by Victor Nikitin (Krasny Oktyabr 40 Plant) regularly fulfilled its assignments by an average of some 161 per cent. The quality of work was excellent. The team assumed patronage over novices who soon started to overfulfil production quotas as well. In 1969 five novices were helped to acquire qualifications in this way. Each of the team-members learned to handle two or three operations. The workers in the team were awarded the titles "Master of Quality" and "Shock Worker of Communist Labour”.

p In the same year 875 young men and women in the plant competed for the title "Champion Young Lathe-Operator”. Courses of technical training were opened in all shops, young workers learned advanced methods of work, and, as a result, their labour productivity went up by 20 to 25 per cent.

p Young people in the district competed for the title "Master of Quality”. The YCLers of the No. 1 Dye-and-finishing Factory pledged themselves to acquire two or three related professions.

p The initiative of Maria Ivannikova, a weaver at the Frunze Textile Mill in Moscow, who called upon her comrades to save enough raw materials to supply the production needs through the whole of April 22, 1970 (Lenin’s centenary), was widely supported by other factories. Her example was followed by the young workers. The YCLers of the No. 1 Wool-Spinning Mill undertook to save enough raw material for four days’ work.

p These are just a few examples. The past five-year-plan period stimulated many movements among young people, both at industrial enterprises, and in the countryside. Advanced Komsomol-youth teams of tractor drivers and machine operators competed for bumper harvests, higher cattle productivity and so on.

p The YCLers and young people of the Zavety Ilyicha collective farm (Obukhovsky district, Kiev Region) were among the initiators of the emulation.

p The team led by Maria Kuryan had always produced good yields of sugar beet, but they knew that in the neighbouring district the team led by Hero of Socialist Labour M. Lysenko had much better results, though the soil was almost of the same quality. When the subject was touched on during a lecture at an agricultural university for young people Maria decided to challenge the famous team.

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p The story was printed in the local newspaper, and it stirred all the young beet-growers in the district. They spent the winter attending agricultural courses and went for consultations with twice Hero of Socialist Labour Olga Diptan. Now their sugar beet harvests are increasing from year to year.

p Today all the teams are mechanised and so they have doubled the size of their fields to a total of 70 hectares. Manual labour has been reduced to a minimum.

p Young cattle-breeders also joined the movement. Nadya Gavrilets, the secretary of the farm’s Komsomol organisation, said: "Our girls decided to get 4,000 litres of milk from each cow!" At first the news astounded some people because even the best collective farms could only manage half this figure. Some thought that the milkmaids were boasting, but Nadya said: “Don’t you worry, Lesya herself promised to come to our aid.”

p A few words should be said about Lesya. She left home to join a partisan detachment while still a girl, came through the Great Patriotic War with honour, and when peace came, graduated from an institute and soon became a school-mistress. Then she was elected chairman of the collective farm.

p Lesya encouraged the milkmaids. Nadya Gavrilets and her friends spent many long days in the dairy farm before they finally won through. They are now getting 4,000 litres of milk from each cow, while Maria Sutkovaya and Sofia Yermak get even more than that.  [41•1 

p Thanks to their own knowledge and industriousness young people are managing to achieve good results in the fields and on the farms.

p What is the source of this million-fold enthusiasm?

p The material factor, of course, plays a certain (and quite important) role. It is well known that under socialism material benefits are distributed according to the amount of labour done: the more and the better the work, the greater the remuneration. This principle of socialism is the fairest one possible in the given social and economic conditions and stimulates people to raise their labour productivity. 42 Consequently, a man’s readiness to improve his well-being by greater personal contribution to the common cause is a natural inclination and not "petty bourgeois economism”, as some Left-sectarian falsifiers would have us believe.

p The desire to improve one’s personal well-being is not the only motivation; and it has been proved in practice that it is neither the only nor the principal motive behind the urge to work exhibited by Soviet youth. Nor does the Soviet citizen’s personal interest in the results of his work amount merely to egoistic indifference towards everything that bears no relation to material remuneration.

p Economic incentives in socialist production imply both material and moral remuneration. But this is not all. Everyday life can provide us with plenty of facts which convincingly prove that the ideological conviction and the political consciousness of the Soviet people are the major source of labour enthusiasm. A vivid manifestation of this are the Communist subbotniks which, on the initiative of the working people themselves, are now held every year.

p Sociological research has proved that working people— particularly young men—are prompted mainly by ideological and moral motives. According to one survey the "most important" motives were, first and foremost, opportunities for constant self-improvement (given by 88 per cent of young people questioned), the opportunity for creative activity (53.5 per cent) and the chance to contribute to the national economy (48.9 per cent); only 28.8 per cent mentioned good pay as a motive for work, and 8.8 per cent career prospects. It is interesting to note that only 20.9 per cent said that guarantees of a secure future were of great importance to them. This is easily understandable, because the Soviet young man is usually confident of the morrow.

The new, communist attitude to work is developing and growing stronger under the influence of the socialist way of life and the collectives in which the Soviet citizen is raised from childhood. This new attitude to work and full comprehension of its great social significance were strikingly revealed by weaver A. V. Smirnova when she addressed the 24th Congress of the CPSU: "Today the Soviet worker,” she said, "is the real master of the land, he is the creator of all values. .. . He regards work not only as a source of 43 earnings, but also as a mighty link binding him to a sacred communion of fellow-workers, who are engaged in creating the fairest social system in the world.”