A look at a Ukrainian city From dust to diamonds By JOHN WEIR There are two aspects about Lvov that ask to be dealt with: The first is how.this ancient west- erm Ukrainian city, which only became Soviet in 1939 and then underwent the horrors of nearly four years of German fascist oc- cupation, has grown and de- veloped. The second is how man- agement and workers here are tackling the question of industrial . management to efficiently pro- duce goods of high quality, in some ways setting the pace for the entire country. To show the changes some figures have to be cited. In 1931 out of 156,600 able- - bodied persons in pre-Soviet Lvov only 28,700 were employed in industry. A somewhat larger number were engaged in trade and finance, while over 13% were in domestic services. Some 84% of the enterprises were small workshops with less than five workers; 60% of the enterprises were in the food processing area; less than 5% in metal-working shops. In 1936 there were 30,000 un- New York Times ca The Santiago.” CHILEAN BUTCHER TO VISIT WASHINGTON rried this photo of Chilean fascist chief Pinochet in its Aug. 25 edition. It was part of the preparations for his visit to Washington, invited by Carter during the signing of the Panama Canal treaty during the meeting of the Organization of American States Sept. 7, 8 and 9. The Times’ caption read: ‘“‘Gen- eral Augusto Pinochet visiting a working class neighborhood in The U.S. Daily World writer Conrad Komorowski bitterly con- demned the Times’ carrying of this photo and wrote: “Obviously he didn’t go there to explain why unions have been abolished, or to explain to the children why their fathers were killed by his storm- troopers, why tens of thousands were jailed ...” : Protests against Pinochet's visit have been arriving at Carter’s door since the visit was announced, including one from the To- ronto Committee for Democratic Chile. employed in the city, including thousands of teachers, doctors and engineers. Today the industries of Lvov district produce more in a week & than they did in the whole of 1946. = Lvov area enterprises daily give 4 more than 40,000 tons of anthra- ” cite coal, 49 buses, 60 trucks, 40,000 pairs of shoes, 227 tons of o sweets and pastry, more than 2 2,000 television sets, 870 mopeds and much else. Thus not only has the output of industry increased to 50.7 times what it was in 1940 and 85.9 times . what it was in 1945, butits nature also has changed. It is now the industry typical of a highly de- veloped economy. This change was made possible by the victory of the Great Socialist Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the policy of helping to bring all sections of the ‘country to the level of the most advanced. And of course, the devoted labor of thousands of working men and women. We had the op- portunity to see how they work in the plant where synthetic diamond tools are made. In the old days a distillery stood here,, _ but in 1963 it was rebuilt to pro- duce synthetic diamonds and diamond tools, and its output is already more than 20 million carats. Most of the 1,600 workers are youth. Most people have an idea of what: diamonds are for, but diamond tools? They are very useful, it transpires, in the economy for honing hard steel and cast iron, tool-grinding “of ~ carbide tools and other jobs. The chief auto and tractor plants use them. They are needed for TV cinescopes. Plant manager Mykola Koshovy, Communist Party Committee secretary Konstantin Uhryk, and honored production worker (now the plant laboratory chief) Volodymyr plant laboratory chief. Gurgal showed us around. In 1972 the no-defects system was introduced. As the term im- plies, the aim was to give high quality production without any “bad apples in the barrel.’ Within two years they were ready to advance to the higher form of the “‘complex system of the man- agement of the quality of produc- tion.” ‘What is that? We learned in the House of Quality which we vis- ited before entering the plant it- self, that it méans highly skilled conscientious work from top to bottom, the output of each worker and at each stage of pro- duction being of the high quality mark, which guarantees the job as a whole to be up to the standard set by the government and leaders of industry. During the two preparatory years every employee — work- ers, skilled workers, engineers, management personnel — took a training course. One day a week was set aside for this. This train- ing has paid off in the ability to. implement new techniques and increase ,productivity of labor. For four years now there has not been a.piece of work turned out ~ that was found badly done or criticized in any way. Speaking of training we must mention attention to the young =¥ Tribune’s Moscow. correspondent John Weir being shown diamond grains during his visit to the Lvov synthetic diamond plant. At right is the people. The plant has ‘‘patron- age’ relations with Secondary School No. 7, top-notch workers visit the school and give talks, while students visit the plant and see how the job is done. The re-— sult:is that students look forward” to working in ‘‘their’’ plant and, in fact, one year the whole gradua- tion class moved over to thé plant. (What a difference from moving from school to thé employment offices!). Gurgal may well serve as af example of the foremost workers in the western Ukraine. He has worked in the plant for 32 years, initiated many advanced methods of management and labor. In 1960 he was awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor title, the medal pinned on his chest by Leonid Brezhnev. In 1961 he was a dele gate to the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and there he met Tim Buck and Leslie Morris, fratern guests from Canada. He himself visited Canada several years ago; _ ‘met Ukrainian’ and ‘other’ Cana” dian people of whom he speaks most warmly. The plant and 15 workers have also been decorated. This plant sends its products t0 40 foreign countries. Canada 18 not among them, it seems. Yet surely we could benefit from such trade. Mass killer bombs and disarmament YC The Toronto Globe and Mail of Au- Marxism-Leninism in Today’s World level of danger for humanity. * * * gust 30 informs its readers in an edito- rial ‘‘To Kill For Peace”’ that the Cana- dian Peace Institute is to address. the United Nations ‘‘with a call for a world-wide disarmament program to. begin by 1982 and to involve annual reductions of 10% in spending on arms’’. It goes on to say that the Insti- tute has concluded on the basis of a computer study that ‘‘fluctuations in violence are directly proportionate to fluctuations in the number and availa- bility of weapons’. The editorial then asks ‘‘ What sort of nonsense is this?” a oe : The Globe and Mail editorial is actu- ally an apology for the arms race. It argues about “‘the necessity of careful balancing (and increasing) arms sales to ensure the maintenance of national in- tegrity everywhere.” It clinches its ar- gument in favor of a continuing arms race by asking: ‘‘What would become of all these vital concerns (balances of power — A.D.) if everyone simply threw up their hands and stopped spending all their money and diplomacy on guns?” This makes us ask: what ‘sort of gobbledygook is this? Perhaps it’s meant to be ridicule? If so it is mis- chievous ridicule. Or, could it be that the Globe and Mail has joined the school of thought in Washington, PACIFIC TRIBUNE—SEPTEMBER 16, 1977—Page 8 headed by recently-retired U.S. Air Force General Keegan and former U.S. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Nitze, who insist that the United States needs not fewer strategic nuclear weapons, but more? * * * Superiority in nuclear armament has been the aim of U.S. imperialism ever since the U.S. military dropped the first atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final days of the Second World War. The Hiroshima bomb kil- led 70,000 people at once and the Nagasaki bomb 60,000. Since then twice that number have died from bomb-related diseases. _ These bombs were dwarf killers compared to modern nuclear bombs. But the deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain. as horrible tragedies in the memories of decent people everywhere. But today countries have so many nuclear bombs (Canada’s ally the United States has over 30,000 of them stockpiled) that thousands of cities like Hiroshima could be de- stroyed. ‘ * * * A single modern warhead has more destructive power than all the explo- sives used by all countries during World War Two. And weapons of mass an- nihilation continue to be developed. The U.S. is now developing, on the instructions of President Carter, the ‘ideal’? mass murder weapon — the neutron bomb that destroys people while leaving property intact. Needless to say the N-Bomb is the darling of Wall Street. Already those who profit from war are calculating its “‘benefits’”’ in terms of additional bill- ions in profits, with little thought of the cost of human life if nuclear war should break out. ‘ * * * The cold war advocates in the United States and in Canada and other capitalist countries seek to have the treaties between the socialist countries . and the capitalist countries torn up. They use various maneuvers and stratagems to achieve this aim. They strive. by every means within their power to rekindle the cold war formula of ‘‘peace through strength’. This concept, justifying the ‘‘balance of terror’ (which the editorial in the Globe and Mail appears to favor) as the real guarantee of peace, is completely false. The official report by UN ex- perts, who are scientists of world fame, demonstrates that each and every step in the development of weapons of mass annihilation creates a more dangerous _ The Globe and Mail to the contrary» the arms race does not guarantee sec urity for anyone. And, if the arms race is not halted, it will inevitably aggravate international tensions thereby limiting in-depth development of political de tente in international relations. They _ cannot have their cake and eat it too: According to UN data, some $300 billion is being spent every year on al maments, or a million dollars every tw® minutes all over the world. On the av: erage, 60 times less is spent on a world scale on teaching a child the science 0 creation than on training a soldier in thé ABCs of mass annihilation. ok The issue facing humanity today is either the arms race be stopped an countries change over to disarmament, reducing step by step the threat of milit ary conflicts thus freeing more an@ more material and intellectual re sources for economic and social de velopment, or, the gigantic military machine will consume ever moré human and material resources and the shadow of nuclear catastrophe wl | lengthen over the world. The danger is great. The need fof action to halt the arms race is urgent: Join the action.