Discurso Eleitorado Stalin Fevereiro 1946

Speech to the Electors of the "Stalin" Electoral Constituency February 9, 1946 The President: Josef Vissarionovitch Stalin has the floor. (The appearance of Comrade Stalin at the podium is received by the electors with deafening ovation lasting several minutes. The entire audience standing in the theater salutes Comrade Stalin. Incessant exclamations are heard: "Hurrah to great Stalin!", "Long live great Stalin!", "Hurrah to dear Stalin!"). Comrade Stalin: "Comrades — Eight years have passed since the last elections to the Supreme Soviet. It has been a period rich in decisive events. The first four years passed amid intense work by Soviet people for the realization of the third five-year plan. The remaining four years comprise events of the war against German and Japanese aggressors, the events of the second world war. Undoubtedly, war was the principal moment of the period that has ended. It would be unjust to think that the second world war arose by chance or as a result of errors by this or that statesman, although without doubt there were errors. In reality, the war arose as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces based on modern monopoly capitalism. The Marxists have declared more than once that the capitalist system of world economy contains implicit elements of general crisis and military clashes, and that by virtue of this, the development of world capitalism in our time proceeds not in the form of smooth and uniform advances, but by means of crises and war catastrophes. The problem is that the unequal development of capitalist countries ordinarily leads, over time, to a sharp alteration of the internal balance of the world capitalist system, with the particularity that the group of capitalist countries considering itself less assured in raw materials and markets for sale, generally seeks to change the situation and effect a new distribution, in its favor, of "spheres of influence," employing armed force. As a res