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

October 6, (Morning session)

Presiding N.S. Khrushchev.

At the meeting, the report of the Central Auditing Commission of the CPSU (b) is heard. Then the congress goes on to discuss the reports of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) and the Central Auditing Commission of the CPSU (b).

L.G. Melnikov, (Ukrainian SSR )

Comrades! (...)

The period between the 18th and 19th congresses will go down in the history of our people as the period of the greatest triumph of LeninistStalinist ideas, the policy of the Communist Party, which is the lifeblood of the Soviet system.

Inspired by the great plan of the Communist Party, set out in the historic speech of Comrade Stalin in 1946, the Soviet people achieved new outstanding successes in economic and cultural development.

In the fraternal community of equal peoples, thanks to the enormous help of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Comrade Stalin, the Soviet government, Soviet Ukraine, an integral and integral part of the great Soviet Union, is growing stronger and developing. The cherished aspirations of the Ukrainian people for the reunification of all Ukrainian lands in a single Ukrainian socialist state have been fulfilled.

In the years of difficult trials, when our Motherland was in mortal danger, the Ukrainian people retained their unshakable loyalty to the great banner of Lenin ‐ Stalin, rallied even more closely around the Communist Party and their leader, Comrade Stalin. The sons and daughters of Soviet Ukraine, together with the entire Soviet people at the fronts, in partisan detachments, in the rear, in evacuated factories, forged victory over the enemy, showing courage and boundless loyalty to the party, the socialist Motherland, with honor overcoming all the trials of the Great Patriotic War, the difficulties of construction and restoration of the economy destroyed by the fascist barbarians.

Relying on the brilliant Stalinist teaching on the national question, the Communist Party rallied the socialist nations of our country into a single fraternal family.

Feeling every day the tremendous help of the Party, all the peoples of our country and, above all, the great Russian people, the tireless care and attention of Comrade Stalin, the Ukrainian Soviet people quickly healed the wounds inflicted by the war and occupation, and successfully develops the socialist economy and culture, makes its worthy contribution to the nationwide building communism. The nationwide socialist emulation was a powerful force that roused the working people of Ukraine to a selfless struggle for the restoration and further development of the national economy.

The restoration and development of coal, metallurgy, machinebuilding, energy and other industries, railway transport was carried out on the basis of a radical reconstruction of old and construction of new enterprises, equipping them with modern Soviet technology, using the achievements of Soviet science, automation and widespread introduction of advanced technology.

In 1951, the volume of gross industrial output exceeded the pre‐war level by 35.2 percent. In August of this year, the average daily production of the most important types of industrial products exceeded the level of 1940 in coal mining by more than 11 percent, iron ore ‐ by 43 percent, pig iron smelting ‐ by 39 percent, steel smelting ‐ by 34 percent, rolled products ‐ by 51 percent, electricity generation ‐ by 51 percent.

In the post‐war years, a number of new industries were created in Ukraine, the production of many new machines and mechanisms was mastered. Fundamental changes have taken place in the composition of the working class. More than 1,100 thousand people came to industry, graduating from factory training schools and vocational schools created on the initiative of Comrade Stalin. A significant rise in the cultural and technical level of the working class is a serious achievement of our Bolshevik Party in the post‐war period.

The industrialization of the western regions of Ukraine is being carried out at a rapid pace. Oil, gas, coal, machine‐building, electrical, forestry and other industries are successfully developing here. More than 2,500 large and medium‐sized industrial enterprises have been restored and rebuilt in the western regions. These areas have never known and could not have known such a rapid industrial development in the past.

During the postwar years, great qualitative changes have also taken place in the socialist agriculture of Soviet Ukraine. Small collective farms have been enlarged, the material and technical base has grown considerably, and the role of machine and tractor stations in collective farm production has increased. At present, machine‐tractor stations perform over 80 percent of the total. all agricultural work in field cultivation. The pre‐war yield of the most important agricultural crops has been surpassed. Collective and state farms from year to year fulfill their obligations to the state ahead of schedule. Collective farms have significantly increased their social wealth, the material well‐being and culture of collective farmers has increased. A large army of foremost workers ‐ innovators of socialist agricultural production ‐ has grown up in the republic. Over the postwar years, 58 thousand collective farmers, machine operators and state farm workers have been awarded orders and medals, over 1,000 people have been awarded the high title of Hero of Socialist Labor. Wide dissemination and widespread implementation of the experience of the foremost workers is our primary task.

Party organizations of the republic pay special attention to expanding the sown area and increasing the gross harvest of all agricultural crops and, above all, industrial crops, as well as the main food crop ‐ wheat. The sown area of winter wheat in comparison with 1940 increased by almost 2 million hectares. Collective and state farms this year handed over wheat to the state by 182 million poods more than in 1940. This autumn, the republicʹs collective farms expanded the area of winter wheat by another 1 million hectares. As is known, the leading industrial crop in Ukraine is sugar beet. Sugar was produced from last yearʹs beet crop by 46 million poods more than in 1940. There is reason to believe that this year too we will get no less sugar, and perhaps even more than last year. The party organization of Ukraine is taking all measures to significantly increase the yield of this most important industrial crop ‐ sugar beet.

The most important task of the party organization of Ukraine is the further development of the cultivation of non‐irrigated cotton, corn, cereals, legumes, potatoes and vegetables, the achievement of sustainable yields and an increase in the gross harvest of these crops.

The collective and state farms of the Ukrainian SSR have fulfilled the three‐year plan for the development of socially productive livestock raising. Over the past three years, the number of cattle has almost doubled, while the number of other types of livestock has increased 2 ‐ 3 times: Until now, its low productivity remains a serious drawback in the development of public livestock raising. The attention of Party organizations, Soviet and agricultural bodies is now drawn to the elimination of this serious shortcoming. We will undoubtedly eliminate this lag.

Soviet power, the collective farm system radically changed the position of the peasants in the western regions of Ukraine, opened the way for them to a new, happy life. Until recently, the lot of the working peasantry in the western regions was landlessness, hopeless poverty, hard labor for the landowner and the kulak.

The Ukrainian writer Olga Kobylyanskaya in the novel ʺLandʺ painted a picture of the hard lot of peasants in Western Ukraine, their struggle for a piece of their own land. One of the heroines of the novel, Maria Fedorchuk, says: ʺWe worked hard until we got this land ... If this land could speak, she would tell how much of our sweat was shed on it ...ʺ

This novel describes a true case that took place in the village of Dymka, present‐day Glyboksky district, Chernivtsi region, where the son of a local peasant, Savva Zhizhiyan, killed his brother to get an allotment of his fatherʹs land.

A collective farm was established in this village four years ago. When presenting to the collective farm an act for the perpetual use of the land, the collective farmer Ivan Zhizhiyan, the son of Savva, who killed his brother, said: “And here it is, the land beyond which the neighbor was looking at his neighbor as a wolf, his brother raised his hand against his brother. The evil times, when the land was the evil stepmother of the peasant, are a thing of the past. Now for all of us, she has become a mother. For all this we thank our great leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin! ʺ (Applause.)

The collective farms of the western regions, using the rich experience of collective farm development accumulated in our country, and receiving enormous assistance from the Soviet state, are successfully developing their social economy. Our Party organization regards the further political, organizational and economic strengthening of the collective farms in the western regions as one of its most important tasks.

For centuries, peasants living in the southern Ukrainian steppes suffered from frequent droughts, dry winds, black storms, dreamed of giving these fertile lands water. And only in our time, according to Stalinʹs plan for transforming nature, this folk dream is being realized.

The working people of Soviet Ukraine met with great satisfaction and joy, with a feeling of warm gratitude to Comrade Stalin, the governmentʹs decision to build the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station, the South Ukrainian and North Crimean canals. The party organization of the republic will do everything to honorably fulfill the assignment of our party, the government, the assignment of the great Stalin to build these construction sites of communism in the south of Ukraine. (Applause.)

Significant successes in the development of industry and agriculture ensured a steady growth in the material well‐being of the people. In the postwar years, over 72 billion rubles have been spent on the needs of public education, health care and social security in the Ukrainian SSR. As a result of the fivefold reduction in prices, the population of Ukraine received a net benefit of about 50 billion rubles. The restoration of many cities has been completed; new settlements have been built. Now the socialized housing stock already exceeds the pre‐war level.

Here is one of the many examples showing how the well‐being of our working people has grown thanks to the tireless cares of the Party and Comrade Stalin. Over the past three years, 101 residential buildings, a hospital, a kindergarten, a secondary school, a bathhouse, a stadium, and 7 shops have been built at only one mine named after Rumyantsev in Gorlovka. Many miners have built their own homes. The average monthly salary of one worker at the mine for the year increased from

1.107 rubles to 1.500 rubles. The miner now earns 2,570 rubles on average, and the driver of a new beautiful machine ‐ a coal harvester ‐ up to 7,000 rubles a month. Last year, miners were paid 986 thousand rubles of collective bonuses and 4.500 thousand rubles of remuneration for long‐term and impeccable work. 427 miners visited resorts, sanatoriums and rest homes during the year. The mine workers purchased 65 Pobeda and Moskvich cars, 507 motorcycles, 570 bicycles, many pianos, radios, etc.

Serious successes have been achieved in the development of Ukrainian culture ‐ national in form, socialist in content. There are about 30 thousand schools in the republic, where about 7 million children study now. The task is being successfully carried out: to cover all children in the countryside with a seven‐year education and in cities with a tenyear education. We have 158 higher educational institutions with over 165,000 students, or 28 percent. more than before the war. More than 40 thousand young specialists graduate from Ukrainian universities annually. Nowadays more than 376 thousand young people study at the universities and technical schools of the republic, much more than before the war.

The Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Architecture, 490 research institutions with a large army of scientific workers operate in Ukraine. On the initiative of Comrade Stalin, a branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian Republic was established in Lvov. Scientists have solved a number of problems of great scientific and national economic importance.

Ukrainian writers and art workers have created many wonderful works that are highly appreciated and widely known among the Soviet people.

We know very well that the main condition for our further success in economic and cultural development is the Marxist‐Leninist training of cadres, their ideological hardening, the communist education of the working people, intransigence to all kinds of manifestations of hostile ideology, and especially to the manifestations of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.

The organization of the Marxist‐Leninist education of the communists has been improved in the party organization of the republic. The desire of party members and candidates, of the broad masses of the working people, to master the Marxist‐Leninist theory is constantly growing. In the past academic year, the number of students in the network of party education reached 1.400 thousand people, including more than 700 thousand non‐party workers, collective farmers and intellectuals.

This year, the release of the 4th edition of V.I. Lenin. 13 volumes of I.V.

Stalin. Karl Marxʹs Capital and other works of the classics of Marxism‐

Leninism are being published in Ukrainian.

But in ideological work we still have major shortcomings and mistakes. The main one of these shortcomings is that in a number of sectors of the ideological front there are still insufficiently trained cadres in the theoretical sense.

The Central Committee of the CP (b) U, the party organization see these shortcomings and mistakes and take all measures to eliminate them as quickly as possible.

Comrades! In our ranks there is not and cannot be a shadow of complacency and seduction with success. The party organization of Soviet Ukraine is clearly aware of the fact that we have many shortcomings in our work, many shortcomings, and many unsolved problems. Communists spoke about these unresolved tasks and shortcomings in the work of party organizations with all their Bolshevik acuteness and irreconcilability at reporting and election meetings, conferences and at the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of Bolsheviks of Ukraine. More than half a million communists spoke at meetings and conferences. They sharply criticized the shortcomings still in party organizational and party‐political work and made many valuable proposals for improving all party work.

In the report comrade. Malenkov quite correctly exposed and criticized serious shortcomings in the work of industry, agriculture and their leadership by our Party organizations and economic leaders.

Indeed, in the republicʹs industry, too, large reserves and opportunities remain far from being used, the use of which would make it possible to significantly increase the output of industrial products. At many enterprises, production capacities are understated, and poorly used, and large equipment downtime is allowed. Some regional and city party committees, when assessing the work of industry, are judged by average data behind which lagging enterprises are hidden. We still have a lot of enterprises that do not fulfill production plans. For example, with the overall implementation of the coal production plan, there are still mines in the Donbass that cannot cope with their production targets and monthly shortage of thousands of tons of coal to the country. Last year a number of our machine‐building plants did not fulfill the plan. Many enterprises fail to fulfill tasks to increase labor productivity, improve quality and reduce production costs. There is still no real struggle to save raw materials and materials, the struggle against waste and excesses.

The further growth of industrial production necessitates the fastest solution of such important issues as improving the water supply to Donbass and other industrial centers of Ukraine, accelerating the construction of power plants and power grids, and expanding housing construction.

It must be said that the party organization of Ukraine has not yet done everything to make full use of all the funds allocated for these purposes, so that the industrial enterprises and residential buildings currently under construction are included in the number of operating today. These issues are also being resolved extremely slowly in some of our union ministries ‐ the Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy, the Ministry of the Coal Industry, the Ministry of the Chemical Industry, the Ministry of Heavy Engineering, and the Ministry of Power Plants. And the solution of these important issues is urgent.

By no means have we done everything to improve the republican industry. In the production of many types of products, this industry has not yet reached the pre‐war level. Improving the work of the republican industry is one of the most important tasks of our party organization.

A serious shortcoming in the development of agriculture in the republic is the presence of a number of lagging collective farms, machine and tractor stations and even entire regions. In Ukraine, there are 128 districts located in the Polesie zone, occupying a fifth of the territory of Ukraine. Collective farm incomes here lag behind other regions of the republic. The advancement of agriculture in Polesye is a most important national economic task for our Party organization. We also need help from the planning authorities, from the USSR Ministry of Agriculture and others.

The fastest elimination of shortcomings in the development of industry and agriculture, in ideological work, the successful fulfillment of the enormous tasks set in the report of the Central Committee of the AllUnion Communist Party of Bolsheviks, require from party organizations to further improve methods of leadership, improve control and verification of the implementation of decisions of the party and government, improve work on the selection and training of personnel, strengthening the party organizational and party political work, further strengthening the primary party organizations, an even wider deployment of self‐criticism and criticism from below.

The publication of Comrade Stalinʹs brilliant works ʺEconomic Problems of Socialism in the USSRʺ and ʺMarxism and Questions of Linguisticsʺ is an outstanding event in the ideological life of our Party and the Soviet people. These works enriched and further developed the theory of Marxism‐Leninism, illuminated the Communist Party and the working people on the path to the complete victory of communism.

The victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War, the wise Stalinist foreign policy ensured a fair resolution of questions about the borders of our Soviet state, as Secretary of the Central Committee comrade Malenkov. Now Soviet Ukraine also borders in the west not with hostile states, as it was before, but with friendly countries of peopleʹs democracies, which are building socialism.

The entire Soviet people unanimously approves the wise foreign and domestic policy of our Communist Party. The whole Party and the Soviet people will meet with great unanimity the report of Comrade Malenkovʹs Stalinist program for the further struggle of the Communist Party for the triumph of the great cause of Lenin ‐ Stalin.

Allow me to assure the 19th Congress of the All‐Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), our great leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin, that the party organization of Ukraine, rallying its ranks even more closely around the Lenin‐Stalinist Central Committee of the party, resolutely eliminating shortcomings and mistakes in its work, will raise the Ukrainian people to struggle for the further successful implementation of the Stalinist program of building communism in our country.

The Ukrainian people, like all the peoples of our great socialist homeland, owe all their victories and achievements to the leadership of our Communist Party, to our dear leader and teacher, our dear Comrade Stalin. (Prolonged applause.) That is why the Ukrainian people, with a feeling of the deepest gratitude, with love and boundless devotion to their own father and teacher, the collector of the Ukrainian lands into a single Ukrainian socialist state, passes from mouth to mouth the nationwide toast: ʺHai, our old father and teacher Comrade Stalin live!ʺ (Stormy, prolonged applause.)