By STANLEY RYERSON

When working people run their
own country ... it can be done

ESPITE the bright afternoon
D sunlight, it was bitterly cold
in Moscow; but the hundreds of
textile workers who crowded
the yard of the Krasny-Holm

Combinat gave a rousing, heart-
“warming welcome to the guest
speaker on the red-draped ros-
trum.

This was a rally to greet the
great 20th Congress of the Party
of Lenin, which had just con-
cluded its momentous sessions.

The speaker, bringing frater-
nal greetings from the working
people of his country, voiced
the firm resolve that peace shall
triumph over war. The eager
enthusiasm with which his voice
was charged as he spoke of the
achievements won and in the
making in the country of So-
cialism bespoke the promise that
his country too shall find the
way to a happy future for all
its people. Tim Buck, of Can-
ada, was addressing the work-
ers of the “Red Hill” factory
and, through TV, of all Moscow.

In Moscow first, then in all
the centres of the farflung So-
viet land, the working people
were coming together to hear
at first hand from the delegates
about the work of the congress.
Its decisions had been prepared
in the course of the countrywide

struggle for production, social |

gains and peace; they opened
the way to a mighty, new ad-

_ vance in every sphere of Soviet
life. :

The factory where Tim Buck
spoke illustrated some of the
problems that are being tackled,
and the spirit of the people who,
under the leadership of the Com-
munist party, are successfully
solving them.

This is an old plant, first
started in 1820 (a quarter of a
century before the first textile
factory was built in Canada).
Before the October Revolution,
it belonged to German capital-

ists. Formerly it turned out
cotton goods, now, woollen suit-
ings.

Of the several thousand work-
ers employed, 85 percent are
women. Thanks to increased
mechanization of the labor pro-
cess, they are turning out twice
the pre-war volume of woollen
goods — more than 14 million
yards — ranging from ordinary
to expensive material.

However, as young Nina Kaz-
mina,’ former worker in the
plant and now a qualified en-
gineer, explained to us, they
are certainly not satisfied.

In the 6th Five Year Plan

they are going to complete the -

mechanizing of the entire cycle
of production, reducing manual
labor to the very minimum. And
she pointed to the great stacks
of packing cases that lined the
walls of the big courtyard; new
automatic machinery to lighten
labor and multiply output, just
received from the machine-
building plants,
am 503 xt

a

This is one of the keynotes of
the 20th Congress decisions: the
streamlining and reconditioning
of the whole productive plant,

“so as to achieve abundance for

the Soviet people and, in so
doing, to outstrip economically
the most advanced capitalist
countries.

- The scale of the new 6th Five
Year Plan is colossal: it involves
a capital investment bigger than
that of the 4th and 5th plan
periods combined, or over six-
teen times that of the Ist Five

. Year Plan. et

Along with the creating of
huge new industrial bases in
Soviet Asia, and a mighty plan
of electrification and atomic en-
ergy development, the plan pro-
vides for the most thorough-
going overhaul of existing plant
and production methods...

Thus, in the Moscow area, ©
where nearly 30 percent of the
lathe-building and tool-making
industry is located, a drive is
under way to replace old, near-
obsolete machinery with new..

One speaker in the discussion
— I. V. Kapitonov — cited a
case of a metal-cutting lathe
being repaired at twice the cost
of a new one. He called for a
higher rate of modernization of
plant and equipment.

What is being done already
can be gathered from the fact
(which he also cited) that dyr-

ing this year no less than 426
news types and sizes of lathes
will be produced in the city’s
plants.

Weak o

In Canada, outstanding feat-
ures of our economy are its in-
stability — “tightrope walking,”

_as the Financial Post described
it recently; its outright subjec-
tion to the dictates of foreign
capital — the theme of the cur-
rent hearings of the Gordon
Commission; and the fact that,
belonging to others than Cana-
dian working people, ‘it serves
their interests and wellbeing
least of any.

“Social security seen for Can-
_ada for 25 years,”‘as one Toron-
to paper announced anti-clim-*
actically a short while . back;
while the Toronto Globe and
Mail editorialized on the fact
that the housing’ boom brought
no relief to the average Cana-
dian family.. . /

s

I thought of all this as I list-
ened to the first speaker in the
discussion, E. A. Furtseva, out-
standing woman engineer and
party worker, as she told of
‘some 4.5 million square yards
of new housing space built in
Moscow during the last Plan,
and more than double that

Now hear

Whodunit? — Back in the
thirties, when the Liberals
were still the government
and Social Credit was only’a
minor party without a seat
to its name, some one swiped
the B.C. Royal Mint dies from
the legislative buildings. The
dies were those used to mint
the $20 gold coins issued un-
der authority of Governor Sir
James Douglas in 1858. Only
a few coins were actually
struck off and they are now
highly prized — and priced
— by collectors.

What’s worrying the auth-

vincial archivist Willard E.
-Ireland, is that whoever
swiped the dies will be tempt-
ed to take advantage of the
free market in gold and cele-
brate the B.C. centennial in
1958 with a counterfeit issue
of the $20 gold pieces. .. .
Our hunch is that the stolen
dies have probably found
their way into the hands of
some wealthy U.S. collector
like so many others of our
provincial treasures.

oe
The Joint Public Relations

this ee e

Committee of the Canadian
Jewish Congress and B'nai
Brith has obtained from At-
torney General Robert Bon-
ner a promise that he will
remove from’ RCMP traffic
violation forms a question

orities now, according to pro--

requiring the racial origin of

the offender to be given. ...

The Vancouver Sun hasn’t
endeared itself to - teachers
by its sensational reporting
of the speech made to the

37th annual convention of the -

B.C. Teachers Federation this
week by Dean Neville V.
Scarfe, head of the new fac-
ulty of education at UBC.
The Sun’s headline, “Baby-
sitters better than ‘some
teachers, dean says,” . did
Dean Scarfe’s speech far less
than justice.

Actually Dean Scarfe re-
ferred to three types of
teachers which, for the sake
of brevity, might be describ-
ed as good, ordinary and
poor. By seizing on his state-

ment about the latter—“Even

a baby-sitter might do better
than some (teachers) who
operate in Canadian class-
rooms” — the Sun reinforced
the arguments of those who
do most to hold the profes-
sion back by insisting that
teaching is a nice cushy job
— although they can’t wait
to get the kids back to school!

_to keep himself in office in-

Everybody’s doing it—Ac-
cording to no less an authori-
ty than the U.S. State De-
partment, even Chiang Kai-
shek’s rump regime on For-
mosa is trading with People’s
China, to the tune of some

$3 million a year. So why
don’t we?
oo 8

It stinks — From all parts
of the city on Monday night
this week people were phon-
ing the newspapers and radio
stations to complain about
the terrible smell. What was
it? Was there a broken gas
main? a

Residents of North Burn-
aby didn’t have to ask. They
knew. They have to live
with that smell from the oil °
refineries, which sometimes —
is so bad it causes some of
them to-be physically ill. By
some freak of the atmosphere
it was wafted over the entire
city'on Monday night. .

Engineers claim that the
smell could be eliminated if
the refineries installed scrub-
bing towers like those in-
stalled at atomic plants. But:
the smell is a lot cheaper,”

* * * .

The politician who thinks
he can fool enough of the
people sufficient of the time

definitely is only fooling

himself,

ee pe

9

*

amount to be provided in the
next one. .

In the past five years they
built 53 hospitals, 147 schools,
338 creches and child care es-
tablishments in Moscow. (Just
think of this in terms of Mon-
treal, Toronto, or others of our
cities!) :

During the new Plan period,
the city will receive additional
hospital accommodation—17,000
beds; and over 200 new school
buildings. Concern for the
needs and wellbeing of the peo-
ple is truly a law of socialist
society!

x o She

When the working people run
their country, and plan its econ-
omy, the policies that prevail
are those that express the real
national interest.

This is shown in the field of
education, where there is steady
advance and achievement (not,
as with us, crisis, curtailed facil-
ities, lowered standards).

It is shown in the field of
public health. Thus, Kovrigina,
Soviet minister of health, was
able to announce that time lost
by workers from sickness was
reduced last year by over 14
percent as compared with 1954;
and that in the collective farms
of the Ukraine, children’s
creches had multiplied ‘seven-
fold as compared with the pre-
war period. :

““In proportion to population,”
she reported, “we are better
provided with medical person-
nel than any. other country, in-
cluding the USA, Britain or
France.” ;

The 6th Five Year Plan, she

men us forging ahead of Soviet Indust
duction¢is called for in the 6th Five Year Plan.

O60

rial pro-

stressed, is a_plan for the health
and happiness of Soviet people.
Adoption of new, up-to-date in-
dustrial techniques, electrifica-
tion, automation, does not only
mean more millions of tons of
metal, combines, cars, millions
of yards of cloth; it means 2’
radical lightening of the load
of toil, a bettering of health and
the enjoyment of it.

The 20th Congress, a mighty
milestone on the road to Com-
munism, signalled a new up-
surge of Soviet democracy.

Teamwork, at all levels, is be- —

coming stronger. There is #
more demanding check-up of
elected representatives,
reporting-back, and the power
of recall by the electors is be-
ing facilitated.

The workers and collective
farmers are being directly
drawn into the work of plan-

ning to a greater extent than ~

ever before. And the driviné
force in the struggle against eD-
crusted bureaucratic methods:
“one-man” leadership, infring&-
ments ,of socialist democracy a?
Gai — is the seven-million-
strong Party of Communists.

The Communist party and the
people are one. As the dele-
gates to the 20th Congress mee
with the workers in the factot-
ies, with the collective farmet
with the professionals and cl’
tural and scientific workers,
pulse-beat of activity quicken
the new horizons of the gré@
Plan become clearer and close:

The Soviet people, in the V@>"
guard of the world, are on the
highroad to the happy, radiant
future that beckons now to a}
mankind.

THE BALANCE OF TERROR
APRIL 6, 1956 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE

more -

‘