Chapter 150:

Chapter 150:

Chapter 150

Hey, baldy!

Yes!! Yes!!! Comrade Secretary. Did you call me?

How is the report that I told you about going?

Khurushchev jumped up like a bullet and ran to me. Ever since I slapped him with a cigarette, he flinched and startled whenever I said anything.

But I didnt hate Khurushchev for that.

Rather, the opposite.

Re, report, sir? We still need more time and budget

Give me a briefing on the progress.

Otherwise, I wouldnt have entrusted him with such an important task.

I assigned Khurushchev the job of drawing up a draft of a huge system that would oversee the design of post-war social services.

The so-called Khurushchev Report. It was a plan that benchmarked the Beveridge Report, which was postponed for a decade or so due to Britain being trampled by Nazi Germany.

Yes! We have set five goals. The targets that our Soviet society should aim for after the war are: want, ignorance, squalor, poverty, and idleness. Accordingly

The purpose itself was similar. Our great victorious people deserved a better life.The initial instance of this chapter being available happened at N0v3l.Bin.

The British must have started from a similar idea.

Thats how it was in real history. During the World War II, the quality of life of the people deteriorated day by day. The British had to endure the German air raids while eating spam. The Soviets had to fight with all their might to stop the German advance and prevent the Ukrainian wheat fields from being taken away.

After paying all those sacrifices and finally defending their homeland, they deserved a better life. Thats why the Labour Party, which proposed from the cradle to the grave, won a landslide victory in the post-war election.

The Soviet Union was relatively more rigid, so there was no significant change during Stalins lifetime, but after Stalins death, all political leaders advocated for improving the quality of life. Even Beria, the head of the NKVD.

Of course, the specific routes could differ.

First, I will explain the five-year plan for increasing agricultural production.

Britain was a capitalist country, so it designed and introduced systems such as social security insurance and national health insurance through the Beveridge Report. This was completely incompatible with the Soviet Union, a socialist country.

Insurance was based on the principle of subscribers burden. You pay a certain amount from your salary and get the necessary protection.

The state may pay some part, but anyway, social insurance was such a system.

But in the Soviet Union, although it was hard to say that it was qualitatively excellent, there was a national, free health care system.

There were already hospitals that were funded and operated by the central government, so what was the use of health insurance?

Rather, the Khurushchev Report dealt with other areas.

Kolkhozes and sovkhozes will be reorganized and a capitalist compensation system will be partially introduced. However, the provision of infrastructure such as agricultural machinery and repair facilities will be adjusted to favor the collective farm system

One of them was improving agricultural productivity through the reform of collective farms.

The worlds agriculture still had not escaped the dependence on animal power. In the countryside, they still plowed the fields with a few cows or horses, sowed seeds, and harvested, in a way similar to 2,000 years ago.

In such a situation, if you just gather people and organize collective farms and tell them to farm, the decline in motivation was obvious.

The benefits of collectivization and division of labor were only found when there was a production system and a compensation system that matched them.

If you plow the land together, you will be lazy and reduce productivity, but if someone drives a tractor and someone sorts the crops on a conveyor belt, it is no different from a general factory.

Only when the factory system was established, the collective farm could exert its power. The United States, which boasts the highest agricultural productivity in the modern world, also farms collectively.

The construction cost doesnt double just because the area doubles. Rather, its more fatal to waste the urban land and complicate the urban planning with substandard housing that cant be used for a few years.

Khrushchev brought the same size of the Khrushchyovka that he had built when he was the Secretary General in real history.

In theory, a four-person household should live in a 9-pyeong or 14-pyeong house, but the reality was harsher, and it was not uncommon to see three generations living together. Or multiple families living in an 18-pyeong apartment.

These were all factors that could cause dissatisfaction among the citizens.

They had to endure leaky water and noisy floors in their cramped and shoddy houses, not to mention the always insufficient rations, and so on.

This place was supposed to be the paradise of the proletariat, and they had to make the residents believe in the propaganda. It had to be livable in reality.

Anyway, since they had blocked the German army well, the only places that were swept by the war () were the Baltics, Belarus, and parts of western Russia and Ukraine. It was desirable to slow down the reconstruction process and aim for quality improvement, as the scope of reconstruction was reduced.

To think that we can use it for 40, 50 years

In fact, in the Soviet states, the Khrushchyovka built in the 1960s, the Khrushchev era, survived until the 2010s.

It might be different for a place like Moscow, where they had money and space, and tore it down. It was better to spend a little more money now than to make them live in such a place for half a century.

This was also a kind of arms race.

You did well, baldy. You did well.

Thank you!!! Secretary General, thank you!!!

After Germanys final blow, the Soviet Union needed a massive military force to protect itself from the United States and NATO.

The Soviet Union squeezed the lives of the people and invested in heavy industry to secure the military force that could fight and win against them, and mass-produced weapons that they couldnt even use. It was not a wrong story.

If they hadnt done that, they would have been defeated militarily and collapsed.

But the Soviet victory, at least in my opinion, was elsewhere.

We have to show them how well we live, so that socialism becomes the envy of the world. We cant catch up with the capitalism of the United States in terms of abundance, but But their shadows are as dark as their light.

Ah As expected, the Secretary Generals insight is

Dont pretend to understand what I said when you dont. Inequality, racism, things like that.

Socialism had to show that it was a system where everyone could live well together.

The United States was the best country in the world, but if you only calculated the black people in the United States, their ranking would drop. In terms of education or life expectancy, it was almost like saying, is this the superpower?

We, the Soviet Union, had to show and provide them with the utopia that they would see and hope for. Not to overthrow capitalism with military confrontation, but to bury capitalism with their own hands.

The huge military spending could be reduced by securing our allies and satellite states not only in Eastern Europe but also in Western Europe. Trying to maintain the closest relationship with the United States was also one of the strategies to reduce the military spending.

And then capitalism would sink like the Great Depression, unable to cope with the massively increased productivity, and socialism would soar by investing the productivity in improving the quality of life. At least, that was the theory.

We will bury you!

As I looked at Khrushchev, who was still sweating profusely, his famous words came to mind.

We will bury you!

While socialism makes the lives of the people happy with the advanced productivity, capitalism sinks with the material that can feed the world, due to the problem of distribution and the concentration of capital.

That was the future predicted by Marx.

When there is a good harvest, people dont eat their fill, but plow and burn the fields to defend the price. Maybe a lot of people would sympathize with that emotionally.

Anyway, after capitalism self-destructed and socialism paradise arrived, we would be the ones to bury you, thats what he meant.

But Khrushchev couldnt kill this nature and caused the Cuban missile crisis, and he self-destructed first by messing around with corn while doing things like nuclear confrontation and missile competition.

As his successor, I shouldnt do that.