15.05.2026, Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at the congress of the Union of Machine Builders of Russia, called on Russian industrial enterprises to speed up decision-making processes in implementing advanced technologies, effectively repeating the famous words of Soviet leader Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin about overcoming the Soviet economy’s lag behind Western countries, Rossa Primavera News Agency notes.
The Russian leader named faster decision-making one of the key principles for the development of Russian industry and urged enterprises to minimize the time between an idea and the release of a finished product.
“Speed in decision-making and implementation is extremely important. We have no right to lag behind either our partners or our competitors in these parameters,” he emphasized.
The statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin almost literally repeat Joseph Stalin’s famous words about eliminating the Soviet Union’s economy’s lag behind Western countries, spoken in 1931 at the First All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel in Socialist Industry, “Either perish, or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.”
Stalin spoke these words on the eve of the Second World War and the mortal struggle of the Soviet people against fascism.
Today, against the backdrop of the accelerated militarization of Europe and its preparations for war with Russia, Stalin’s words sound more relevant than ever, and it is entirely understandable that the theses of the current leader of the country resemble them.
But whether Russia is capable of overcoming this catastrophic industrial lag in the shortest possible time, after more than 30 years during which everything was done to completely destroy the Russian economy, is a rhetorical question.
An affirmative answer to this question would require far greater strength and far greater exertion from all citizens of the country than the efforts made by our ancestors during the industrialization of the 1920s and 1930s to create the world’s most powerful state.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
