Eighteenth All-Union Conference of the All-Union Communist Party

held in Moscow on Feb. 15-20, 1941. The conference was attended by 456 delegates with a deciding vote and 138 delegates with a consultative vote, and they represented 3,876,885 members and candidate members of the Party. The agenda of the conference included the tasks of the Party organizations in industry and transport (speaker, G. M. Malenkov), the economic results of 1940 and the plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR for 1941 (speaker, N. A. Voznesenskii), and organizational questions. The conference worked under the conditions of the complex international situation created by World War II, which had already broken out. The conference focused its attention on questions of the further intensive development of industry, especially of the sectors important for defense. The report noted the gains of the first three years of the third five-year plan (1938-42) and revealed shortcomings that stood in the way of a more rapid upswing of industry. The conference called for “the party organizations to turn their attention resolutely toward maximum concern with the needs and interests of industry and transport.” Measures for strengthening the Party guidance of industry and transport were worked out. The conference obligated the Party organizations to devote more attention to the correct recruitment, placement, and utilization of managerial personnel and of engineers and technicians and to be more bold in promoting specialists with initiative to managerial positions; it called for special attention to be devoted to problems of the introduction of new machinery and methods, the strengthening of labor discipline, and the strict and consistent implementation of the principle of material incentive to the best workers in industry and transport. The conference set the following concrete economic and political tasks be-fore the Party: to ensure continuous control over the work of enterprises and over the fulfillment by them of Party directives, to promote the smooth working of enterprises and to see to it that they fulfilled production plans on schedule, to bring about the observance of the strictest discipline in the technological processes and to refine and master new machinery and technology, and to fight for systematic improvement of output quality, lowering of the prime cost of production, and strengthening of economic accountability. With a view to strengthening Party leadership, the office of secretary for industry and transport was instituted in city, oblast, and krai Party committees and in the central committee of the Communist Party of each Union republic. The plan for the development of the national economy for 1941 was approved. This plan provided for accelerating the development of the sectors of the national economy related to defense, for creating the necessary state reserve fronts, and for mobilizing reserve stocks. Industrial output was to be increased by 17-18 percent over 1940. Much attention was devoted to strengthening the industrial base in the east of the country, a step which was to play a decisive role during the Great Patriotic War. The conference elected new members to the Central Committee of the Party and to the Central Auditing Commission.