ECONOMY OF RUSSIA

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27894, 16 February 1956, Page 13

ECONOMY OF RUSSIA

Claim By Mr Khrushchev (Rec. 10 p.m.) MOSCOW, Feb. 14. According to the Moscow radio, Mr Khrushchev, in his party congress jpeech. cited a number of facts he said illustrated the economic advance of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies.

“The Soviet Union,” he said, “has increased its industrial production more than twenty-fold during the last quarter of a century, or 26 years to be more exact, in spite of the tremendous damage done to the national economy by the war. “During the same oeriod the United States, which enjoyed exceptionally favourable conditions, managed to advance production only a trifle more than double. “But. on the whole, industry in the capitalist world did not even attain inch a rate of development.” Mr Khrushchev said that the countries of the neonle’s democracies had also left the capitalist states far behind in the rate of industrial development.

The Soviet Union, he said, already occupied second dace in the world in gross volume of industrial production. In production of iron, steel, aluminium copper, machinery, electric power, cement and coal, the Soviet Union had long surpassed France. West Germany, and Britain, and was now “competently overtaking the United States.”

Mr Khrushchev said the main features of the present epoch was /‘the emergence of socialism from within the framework of one country and its conversion into a world-wide system. “The simultaneous existence of two diametrically opposed world economic systems, the capitalist and the socialist, which developed in accordance with different laws and in opposite directions, is an indisputable fact.” he said.