UNWRITTEN

a six-storey building? It’s clearly cheaper to put up a new building than to reconstruct an old one.

When you hear proposals of this kind, you can’t help remembering Shchedrin ridiculing the governor who knocked down everything built by his precursor. It turns out that the habits mocked by the Great Russian satirist Shchedrin are still alive among us today! (Applause.) [...]

Improving quality: the most important task faced by our builders Comrades, special attention should be paid to improving the quality of construction. We must build not merely quickly, but unfailingly well and sturdily, and we must value our reputation as builders. Buildings should be convenient for living in and convenient in exploitation.

Badly built buildings have to be repaired after short periods of time, which means having to spend extra money. This applies to all types of construction.

First and foremost, I would like to talk about quality of construction in residential buildings. Are the walls and ceilings of our buildings well made? I think they are very well made. In our residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and other buildings the walls and ceilings are constructed in such a way that they will perform their functions for hundreds of years. There can be no doubt about this since we use reinforced concrete for construction. But it has to be said that the decoration of buildings is often done badly. What’s more, many workers put up with clearly unconscientiously work in decorating buildings. This has been said in full fairness by many comrades at the conference.

Recently comrades Bulganin and Mikoyan and myself had to visit many cities in the Far East, Siberia, and the Urals. We were looked after well. Which is understandable – given that we’re demanding guests and that we have the power to criticize – and in fact do even more than just criticize. So naturally they tried to ensure the best conditions for us. (Laughter, applause.) In the city of Sverdlovsk we lived in a hotel. This hotel was well and sturdily made. It has to be supposed that we were given by no means the worst rooms.

(Laughter.) And in this hotel we saw that the bathroom and toilet blocks were very badly built and that the quality of decorative work was poor. We asked for the hotel director and the city leaders and said to them: ‘Look how poor this work is!’