TWO YEARS out of seven

THE SOVIET PEOPLE have just completed the first two years of the seven-year plan. Statistics on production in industry and farming aside for the moment—what difference have these two years made in the living conditions of the average Soviet family? To make our average family as representative as possible, let us choose one from a small town far from large industrial centers, rather than from a big city like Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev or Sverdlovsk, where the impact of the plan is more immediate and more apparent.

The Kuznetsova—that's the family pictured on these pages—live in Stalinogorsk, a small city in Tula Region. Alexander is a gas welder employed at the Stalinogorsk Chemical Plant. Yekaterina is a housewife. They have three daughters, two of them working, the third a teenager still at school.

Alexander Kuznetsov looked puzzled when we asked him about the changes during these past two years in his home life, his job or his town.

"Changes!" he exclaimed. "Nothing but. So many that I have to think back to remember them all. Take the plant. We converted to natural gas a year ago and work exclusively on that now instead of coke. The shops are all much cleaner now, and our production has shot way up."

The production process had been reorganized, he explained, to make the work easier for the operators. A worker used to have to shield his eyes from the terrific heat when he looked into the vats and containers; now there are television screens for checkups. Every shop has control panels, and the people behind them feel more like laboratory technicians than factory workers.

Kuznetsov has been at the Stalinogorsk Chemical Plant since 1933 when it opened. He learned gas welding right there and ever since has been working on one or another repair or assembly job. When we came to the plant, he was taking apart instead of putting together—dismantling the former gas generator shop. "It feels funny," he said. "I helped to build these generators that I am cutting up now."

The change-over to natural gas last year was the initial step in modernizing the plant. The first to be completely automated was the shop for the separation of air. Automatic equipment is now being installed in a group of recently built shops for the separation of methane. This year the plant will begin producing material for the manufacture of synthetic wool. It will supply textile mills that are being constructed not far from Stalinogorsk.

Yekaterina Kuznetsova had this to say in answer to our query about whether the family was living any better than it had two years ago:

"When I do my shopping, I see a wider choice and better quality of goods in every store. Or take prices—on many items they have been cut in these past years. It's like raising my husband's wage. But what is even better for my family is that we received a new apartment. It was last February, exactly one year after the seven-year plan was adopted."

One of the objectives of the seven-year plan for Stalinogorsk is a modern apartment for every family. The city's housing construction program has been considerably stepped up in the past two years, and as of now 63 new apartment houses have been built. Every month now dozens of workers of the chemical plant and the local power station move with their families into new apartments.

Twenty years ago Stalinogorsk was considered a good city to live in, with relatively modern housing, but people today have new requirements and "relatively good" is not good enough.

The new streets of the city keep pushing the surrounding steppe back. The old is giving way to the new, step by step, everywhere, as the builders complete, one after another, new five- and six-story apartment buildings, motion picture theaters, restaurants and shops. One of the newer conveniences for which Yekaterina Kuznetsova and other Stalinogorsk housewives are grateful is a home-service kitchen that prepares carry-out meals.

Stalinogorsk's educational setup has been considerably expanded during the past two years. The city built ten new day and evening general schools and a specialized chemico-mechanical secondary school. Its Chemicotechnological Institute moved into a new five-story building.

The Kuznetsovs' two elder daughters Valentina and Raissa combine work with study. Advanced education is practically a social must everywhere in the country these days. This helps explain why both specialized schools in Stalinogorsk get more applicants than they have room for. Preference is given to those who have already had some work experience.

Valentina, the eldest daughter, who is 23 now, went to work at the Stalinogorsk Chemical Plant as a timekeeper when she graduated from secondary school. At first she wasn't particularly interested in advanced schooling.

"What for?" she asked her father. "I'm making good wages and the work is all right."

Her father was insistent: "You don't want to be a timekeeper all your life, do you?"

Valentina kept pleading lack of time, but the excuse wasn't quite convincing, especially when the plant workday was cut from eight to seven hours. She finally succumbed and enrolled as an evening student at the chemico-mechanical school. Now she's very glad that her father, as she puts it, knocked some sense into her head.

She attends school three evenings a week, four hours a session, and gets her practical experience on the job. She's in her third year at the school, and her training has already paid off in terms of a skilled job and higher pay. She says, only half-joking, that she'll soon be earning more than her father makes. Kuznetsov doesn't seem to be worried at the prospect.

Valentina is doing very well indeed as both student and worker. She seems to be heading toward the "captain's bridge" of the plant—the Central Control Panel of the shops that separate methane. She has already started to learn the operation of the apparatus installed there.

In October last year Valentina was married. Her husband Nikolai Ranin works as an electrician at the Stalinogorsk power station. This coming May Day they plan to give a housewarming party of their own—they will be getting an apartment in one of the new houses now being built in the city. Every once in a while they walk over to watch it going up.

Early last year the USSR Supreme Soviet, the country's parliament, passed a law to abolish the income tax gradually. Those making 50 rubles a month or less (figured in terms of the new ruble) were exempt as of October 1, 1960. By the end of the seven-year plan the law will cover all workers in every income bracket. Among the first group to enjoy tax exemption was Raissa, the Kuznetsovs' 19-year-old daughter, who started at the Stalinogorsk Chemical Plant last fall as a tracer in the design office.

Like her elder sister, she is continuing her schooling—she is an evening student at the Stalinogorsk Chemicotechnological Institute. When she is through with the five-year course, she hopes to remain in the design office, but at a much more engrossing and challenging job than the purely mechanical one she now does as a tracer.

Raissa is also something of a musician, and she has an interesting method, even if it's a very personal one, of learning musical notation.

"I've always been fond of mechanical drawing," she says. "Strange as it may sound, it was mechanical drawing that helped me master musical notation when I began to study the piano. I kept drawing every note on music sheets until I knew them all by heart. My fondness for mechanical drawing also carried over to the analytic geometry and theoretical mechanics I'm studying at the institute."

Although Raissa has many friends at the institute—they are all young people who work at the plant—she tends to stay home more than her sister did. She's a somewhat more serious-minded person who prefers reading to dancing.

The Kuznetsovs' youngest daughter, Lida, is fourteen. She's an all-around girl with a teenager's multiple and changing interests.

This year she's crazy about chess, heads the mathematics club in her school and is working hard to prepare for the mathematics contest the city has scheduled for youngsters. Last year she was the mainstay of the dramatics club at the Young Pioneer Palace and had no time or interest in anything not connected with the stage.

Lida loves to write letters and has pen-pals in Bulgaria, Rumania, Italy and Vietnam. Like all young people, they enjoy sharing news about their schools, families, friends and plans for the future.

When she's asked what she would like to do after she graduates from secondary school, she says: "I want to go to a medical college in Moscow." She doesn't question the fact that she will be able to if she passes the competitive entrance exams. Finances won't stand in the way since all schooling, including university and professional education, is free in the Soviet Union.

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With three members of the family working, the Kuznetsovs' combined income comes to 240 rubles a month. Most of it goes for food, clothes, furniture and entertainment. Rent is low—less than 2.5 per cent of the family income. That is about the only thing that hasn't changed. Otherwise there have been changes by the dozens, the Kuznetsovs agree, in the first two years of the seven-year plan period—all of them to the good.