XIX Congress of the CPSU (b) - (October 5-14, 1952). Documents and Materials

October 7th

(Evening meeting)

Presiding L.M. Kaganovich.

The meeting concluded the discussion of the reports of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) and the Central Auditing Commission of the CPSU (b). The congress unanimously adopts a resolution on the report of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b).

At the meeting, speeches of foreign guests of the congress begin.

N.I. Belyaev, (Altai region )

Comrades! (...)

Our Motherland, under the leadership of the party of Lenin‐Stalin, is carrying out gigantic creative work. The Soviet Union has become an invincible fortress for the forces of peace and democracy. Its role in the international arena has grown immeasurably. The Soviet people are successfully building a communist society. Comrade Stalinʹs new brilliant work ʺEconomic Problems of Socialism in the USSRʺ, which is a great contribution to the ideological treasury of Marxism‐Leninism, inspires the Party and the Soviet people to new exploits in building communism in our country.

We live in a happy Stalinist era, in the era of the victorious building of communism. We have had the great happiness to live, fight and win under the direct guidance of the brilliant theoretician, the greatest strategist Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin! (Stormy applause.)

Together with the entire Soviet people, under the leadership of the Lenin‐Stalin party, the workers of the Altai Territory are actively building communism.

During the Great Patriotic War, when all the forces and means of the working people of the Soviet Union were subordinated to the main task ‐ the defeat of the hated enemy, the Siberian Altai heroically fought against the invaders and tirelessly strengthened the military might of their homeland, providing ever‐increasing amounts of bread for the beloved Soviet Army and raw materials for industry.

The working people of our region are working with inexhaustible energy and labor enthusiasm at the present time, in the years of peaceful construction. By the will of the Bolshevik Party, thanks to the daily attention that the party and the government pay to the development of the region, Altai has become an important economic region of the country. A powerful tractor, machine‐building, light, timber and food industries have been created in the region. The products of Altai plants and factories ‐ tractors, plows, diesel motors, boilers, fabrics ‐ play an important role in the development of a number of branches of the national economy of our country. New cities arose in the region ‐ Rubtsovsk, Zmeinogorsk, and others, and a large railway construction was launched. New railway lines of the South Siberian Mainline cross Altai from east to west.

Thanks to the enormous help from the party and the government, the agriculture of the Altai Territory has grown significantly. In the full sense of the word it has been transformed into a highly intensive mechanized economy. Sowing and harvesting on an area of up to 4 million hectares is carried out with the most advanced modern machines. 200 machine and tractor stations serve all 1,340 large collective farms.

Rural workers are persistently fighting for the development of advanced Soviet technology and are successfully using it in the struggle for high yields on collective and state farm fields.

The agriculture of the region is carried out in the conditions of periodically recurring drought in the main grain areas of the region, located in the Kulunda steppe. Despite this, Altai workers are successfully fighting to give the state as much bread, meat, oil, wool and other agricultural products and raw materials as possible.

With great enthusiasm, the working people of our region greeted the draft directives of the 19th Congress on the fifth five‐year plan for the development of the USSR, which provides for preparatory work for the construction of irrigation systems for irrigation and watering of the lands of the Kulunda steppe.

The implementation of the construction of an irrigation system in the Kulunda steppe will radically transform the agriculture of the Altai Territory and Western Siberia. According to our calculations, the gross harvest of grain, especially spring wheat, will increase by at least 400 million poods. Favorable conditions will be created for the cultivation of other agricultural crops, the fodder base will be strengthened, the number of public livestock and its productivity will increase.

The collective farm peasantry of Altai expresses its ardent love and deep gratitude to the Communist Party, personally to Comrade Stalin for the great concern for the prosperity of collective farms in Altai and is fighting with greater vigor for the further development of agriculture and the organizational and economic strengthening of collective farms.

Under the leadership of the party organization, the Altai collective farmers launched a broad offensive against drought. In the Kulunda steppe, state field‐protective forest belts with a total length of up to 400 km are being created, ponds and reservoirs are being built.

Speaking about these successes of socialist agriculture, it should be noted, however, that we have not yet achieved the high and stable yields that are capable of producing the fertile lands of the Altai fields. Many party organizations of the region are still poorly conducting organizational and mass political work among collective farmers, machine operators, and agricultural workers. We have not yet achieved a high level of agricultural production everywhere, in every collective and state farm.

The party organization of our region will eliminate the existing shortcomings in the management of agriculture. We need help from central organizations in obtaining high sustainable yields and developing livestock farming. It is necessary to radically revise the structure of agriculture in the region. Agriculture cannot be conducted in only one direction, grain, as it is now. This direction of agriculture is associated with great risk. In unfavorable conditions of a dry year, it bears great damage.

In order to avoid this, it is necessary to increase in every possible way the sowing of industrial crops ‐ sunflower, curl flax, as well as sowing of perennial grasses, fodder and melons. On the vast expanses of Kulunda, each collective farm can and should have many tens of thousands of fine‐wool sheep that provide high‐quality wool to the state and large incomes for collective farms.

With such a comprehensive development of agriculture in Altai, drought will not be terrible. However, the USSR State Planning Committee and the Ministry of Agriculture do not take these circumstances into account, planning to expand the sown area only at the expense of spring wheat, the sowing of which in many regions already reaches 80 percent of the total sowing of all agricultural crops.

Isnʹt it time for the Ministry of Agriculture and the State Planning Committee of the USSR to seriously and deeply understand the structure of agriculture in the Kulunda steppe?

It is also necessary to further strengthen the mechanization of agricultural production, especially in fodder and livestock raising, to eliminate bottlenecks in the mechanization of the cultivation of industrial crops, as well as in grain processing.

In his report, Comrade Malenkov revealed serious shortcomings in the work of individual local Party bodies in the direction of Party organizations and economic development. The indications of these shortcomings fully apply to our Party organization.

The Central Committee of the Party seriously corrected the Altai Territory Committee in its work on the leadership of collective farms. The Central Committee of the All‐Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) sharply condemned the facts of the diversion of public goods in the collective farms of the Altai Territory and rendered the regional party organization great assistance in correcting our mistakes in the management of collective farms. The regional committee and district committees of the party correct the mistakes. In all collective farms, a check was carried out for compliance with the Charter of the Agricultural Artel; the collective farms were fully returned everything that had been illegally taken from them, and the persons guilty of embezzling property were brought to justice. The composition of the chairmen of collective farms has been strengthened, and the leadership of collective farms has been improved by local Party and Soviet bodies.

The mistakes we made in the leadership of the collective farms will be persistently corrected. Accurate and strict implementation of the Charter of an agricultural artel will always be in the center of our attention. The regional party organization will vigilantly guard the social economy of the collective farms from all encroachments on the part of the enemies of the collective farm system.

Comrades! The Altai party organization, which has 78 thousand communists in its membership, came to the 19th Congress of the Communist Party as a united, united and endlessly devoted to the Leninist‐Stalinist Central Committee of the party, the great Stalin. The Altai communists will devote all their strength, knowledge and experience to honorably fulfill any task of the party, Comrade Stalin.

Long live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!

Long live and live for many years the great leader and teacher, our dear and beloved Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin! (Stormy applause.)