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The Second Five Year Plan in the Sovjet-Union

<>. (Theses of the report of Comrade Molotov, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, to the XVIIth Party Congress).

What was capitalist Russia like? On the one hand, oriental luxury of the Court, of the Royal Suits, on the maintenance of which enormous sums of people's money were spent, idleness and luxury of the sybaritic and degenerated, inapt Russian aristocracy and a small handful of captalists [[capitalists]], strict decorous or,der [[order]], beauty and good arrangement of the central districts of the capital, the seat of the Court and upper bureaucracy, - and on the other hand - poverty, filth of the workers', suburbs, impassable roads, illiteracy, ignorant superstitions, dull, hard labour, arbitrariness of the landlords and administration in the village.

The 8-hour working day did not exist in capitalist Russia. There was no social insurance. Trade unions were prohibited. The working and living conditions of the workers and peasant masses were such that in spite of the terror and police oppression, the discontent of the workers was all the time finding expression in out breaks of strikes, unrest in the factories and revolutionary movements, carrying away also a section of the bourgeois students. The village silently suffered, giving vent sometimes, when they lost their patience, to peasant uprisings and revolts breaking out and running high, like a fire, - spontaneous, hopeless and violent outbursts.

But the national minorities were the most exploited and oppressed strata of the whole population. About 180 nationalities inhabited the vast territory of capitalist Russia, - the Soviet Union today. The Tzarist Government added national oppression to its bourgeois-feudal yoke. The outskirts of the country, the regions populated by national minorities were transformed into cloonial [[colonial]] sources of raw material and markets. The whole industry was concentrated in the central areas, populated by Great Russians, and the national regions, in spite of the most favourable conditions and the abundance of natural wealth, were unable to develop their industry. The national minorities

were entitled to reduced civil rights. Education was almost forbidden to them, for it was conducted in the Russian language. Some of the nationalities did not even have their own written language. They had no press. They only <> the national minorities were getting from their colonisers was vodka, syphilie [[syphilis]], smal-pox [[small-pox]], tuberculosis. There is nothing surprising in the fact that the national minorities of Russia were rapidly dying out.

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[[caption]] Conference of Uzbek collective farmers who have attained equality with other workers under Sovjet Rule. [[/caption]]

15 years ago the working class of Russia overthrew Tzarism and the capitalists and took political power into its own hands. What did it inherit from the old regime? The imperialist war and intervention destroyed the small industry and inadequate transport which existed in capitalist Russia. It was necessary to create everything anew. By the efforts of all the toilers of the the Soviet Union, the USSR, the land of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was transformed during 15 years from a pauperised, shabby and backward, culturally and economically capitalist Russia, into a well advanced industrial country. It has already