The Reconstruction of Moscow

in Moscow "as the chief instrument for the solution of the problem of affording the people rapid and cheap pas- senger service." ' Four years have passed since the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party heard the report of L. M. Kaganovich on the socialist reconstruction of Mos- cow and the cities of the U.S.S.R,, and adopted the decision on the necessity of building the subway. And now in opening the first section of the subway, one of the most magnificent creations our age has produced, the working class of the U.S.S.R. can justly pride itself in its great achievement. In 1931, on the eve of the Plenum of the Central Com- mittee, a heated discussion was carried on in the Soviet press and among the municipal workers as to whether Moscow needed a subway. A considerable number of the so-called "theoreticians" on municipal enterprises — and they were secoiided by many practical men— were opposed to the construction of a subway not for reasons of utility, but "on principle." They went so far as to say that the subway is a purely capitalist form of transportation, that it is an "anti-social form of urban transportation," that Communists must categorically veto the very idea of building a subway. People wrote in all seriousness — and there were those who took these people seriously and listened to their "rev- elations"— that under socialism the population will not move about more rapidly but more slowly than under capitalism. These "theoreticians" asserted that the popu- lation will not have to move about so much since every- thing for the service of man will be found at his own doorstep. In other words, according to their "theory," in the future people were to become self-sufficient stick-in- the-muds.

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