• RoscoeHor
• 31 Oct 2024
• Общество и взаимоотношения
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Spring, Work, Peace

Spring is the dearest daughter of the year.

All marvels of life come with spring: the royal blooming of the earth, the warm showers, the shining rainbow in the clear sky, the blue flight of skylarks.

Spring brings renewal to the heart, because man cannot live without faith in a radiant future, without the hope that it will come. Like people, hopes have their spring and their autumn.

Only the calender depends on the degree of human warmth rather than the rotation of the earth.

Workers in all parts of the globe were the first to grasp this. May, the month of the working people's proletarian solidarity, like poppies in the steppe, is the scarlet colour of life and struggle.

Spring comes with winds. They have not always been warm. And hopes, unfortunately, become reality without struggle only in fairy tales...

The cool fragrance of the bird-cherry floats over Moscow, and the old elk, treading its customary path along the sun-warmed, thawed black earth, is surprised to find at the end of the trail towerlike cranes, chilly in the pre-dawn mist. In the course of the winter the city has once again spilled over its former boundaries.

In the editorial offices of newspapers the teletypes are clicking out reports. They are like the pulse of our spring.

"The Soviet Union is building more than 40 university and institute complexes. Housewarmings will be celebrated by the students of the Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University, the universities of Dnepropetrovsk, Leningrad, and Alma-Ata, the Moscow Institute of Aviation Engineers, the Nikolayev Institute of Shipbuilders... These magnificent student centres provide all the requisites for fruitful studies, scientific research, sports and recreation...

Spring brings people fresh hopes:

"In the south-west of the capital, the main building of the All-Union Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology is going up — Europe's largest mother-and-child protection centre. In the west, amid the greenery of forests, a site has been allotted for a hospital for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Here this scourge of the century will be attacked by 2,000 specialists. Moscow architects have been designing a research township for the Siberian Section of the Lenin Agricultural Academy, new buildings for vocational training schools, a Youth Palace...

Spring is transfiguring the streets and peeking into factory and plant shops: "The Serp і Molot (Hammer and Sickle) Plant has entered its 10th decade. But whoever has visited it will confirm that this enterprise is young. Its people are full of vigour and creative plans. The secret of this youthfulness lies in the continuity of efforts made by the different generations of workers, in constant renewal of production, in the ability to utilize the immense possibilities opened up for man by Soviet power..."

Spring is a feast of labour and peace.

The world is tired of fear.

May 1945 raised great hopes In those days even carrion-vultures pledged that they were doves.

Thousands of cities and towns were devastated, and there was not a family in Europe which remained unscarred by the holocaust. The warmongers feared that they would find themselves unemployed.

But in a year or two the newspapers were already writing about "dashed hopes" and however "local" were the new wars, interventions and black coups, the mothers who lost their sons did not feel any the better for that.

Even people who were not very good at arithmetic began to grasp the theory of relativity: the world was at 'peace", but since May 1945 the planet has not known a single peaceful day. Every day, blood has been spilled in at least one corner of the globe, and the machine-guns made in 1948 or 1970 were just as lethal in Korea, Vietnam, East Pakistan, or Ulster as those in 1943. The Middle East has blazed like oil, which can be a source of both happiness and grief to a country that has it underground.

But nothing burns so bitterly as illusions. Those who yesterday saw in Pinochete a "saviour of Western liberties" today find themselves outside the law and the world s eyes were reopened to the fact that fascism is not at all the nightmarish memories of 30 years ago. The burning of books in the streets of Santiago and the thousands of victims who were shot, strangled, hanged, only because they loved their people and their country, have enlightened those who were blind before. But isn't the price too heavy?

The basest human quality is indifference.

If it is left undefended, spring can give way to the coldest of winters.

People help trees to survive the spring frosts.

People must help themselves.

The reason why we propose reducing the burden of armaments and helping the developing and needy countries is not fear that our table will collapse from a surplus of viands. When a house is being built only a careless builder wastes bricks. But we would not be Soviet citizens if today, at the close of the 20th century, we could indifferently watch millions of people die of hunger.

We, who in the last war lost more than any nation, we know what grief is. So, when some politicians see in our business proposals "Kremlin intrigues" we answer: it is better to trade then to bury our sons.

Coexistence is the logic of common sense.

Fragments of the bombs that burst in 1944 are reaching 1974. In Japan there is no end to the lengthening list of Hiroshima victims. Today a small part of the world s nuclear stockpile is enough to destroy all mankind. Only a maniac can dream of a triumph on a charred planet. Our blue cradle is too small for such "experiments".

Indeed, the Kremlin does have plans, but they are not secret. It plans to give people confidence in the future, to enable mothers to serenely raise their sons, and the sons to live full happy lives, rather than lie with bullet- smashed heads under alien stars.

Only unconscientious individuals can close their eyes to the aims of the USSR's national economic plans.

The past third, decisive year of the Ninth Five-Year Plan period was marked by fresh advances of our people in communist construction, in the realisation of the Soviet Communist Party's Leninist general line in domestic and foreign policies. A powerful new upsurge of civic activity was aroused in the Soviet people by the decisions of the December 1973 Plenary session of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and the 7th session of the USSR Supreme Soviet of the 8th convocation and the statements by Leonid Brezhnev.

In addressing the December Plenary session, L. Brezhnev pointed out that in the course of recent events the unity of the countries forming the socialist community yielded good results. The changes in Europe favouring European peace and security are becoming increasingly noticeable. The year 1973 brought marked progress in Soviet-American relations, above all, on the main issue — the lessening of the danger of war and consolidation of peace. The Soviet Union is actively developing its contacts with Asian states. A vivid example of this is Leonid Brezhnev's visit to India.

The multifaceted activity of our Party and the Soviet state designed to implement the Programme of peace, which was advanced by the Party's 24th Congress, enjoys the recognition and support of all peace-loving forces on our planet, of all progressive mankind. Graphic evidence of this was, in particular, the World Trade Union Congress in Varna and the World Congress of Peace Forces in Moscow.

Peace, Moscow, spring — these concepts have become indivisible.

An intercontinental rocket can lift a warhead with a hydrogen bomb and a peaceful spaceship. Mankind breathed easier on hearing that Soviet and American spacemen were exchanging the handclasp of friendship. The road to the stars is the future of all mankind and I am not the only one to remember what a Russian cosmonaut said when a correspondent asked: "What is the most important element in the preparation for joint flights?"

"It is the ability and possibility to always come to each other’s aid. There can be no victory in outer space without this."

But is the victory of spring, friendship and common sense in the world possible without this?

"The ability and possibility to always come to each other's aid ..." is the voice of our spring.

In folk tales spring has always been depicted in the form of a young maiden with a green branch in her hand.

Now, spreading from Brest to Vladivostok, the Land of Soviets is dotted with building projects and flocks of rooks fly over the mist rising from the tilled black earth.

Springtime is a busy season for those who grow the food for our 250-million people. On thousands of collective and state farms ploughing is in full swing. Our hard-working farmers have one wish — a peaceful sky and good crops for all the people on earth.

by Anatoli YOLKIN
Sputnik. №5 May 1974