I am pulling yet another night shift, laboring over the wheels of reform.
My head throbs, and the stacks of paper—drafts for a new society—seem to dance mockingly before my eyes.
And yet, here is the strange truth: in days past, such nights would have turned my stomach with bile, but now, a fire burns in my chest instead.
Ever since the Perestroika was passed by unanimous vote, and that moment when a representative of the peasants grasped my hand with tears in his eyes, optimism has taken root in my mind, far deeper than any pessimism.
The realization that—unlike the historical Soviet Union—we are actually succeeding seems to straighten my spine every time I stamp a document at dawn.
I have come to take joy in the fact that revolution is not merely the storming of cities; it is the tedious, methodical process of refining legislation, line by painstaking line.
Instead of drowning my nerves in alcohol, I drink from the well of reform; instead of burning tobacco, I burn through blueprints.
This intoxication—this 'revolutionary fervor'—it is perhaps a necessary vice.
Yes... I deserve at least this much ecstasy.
After all, I have survived the grinder to stand here today.
Labor reform stands at the vanguard. The reason is simple.
The black smoke belching from factory chimneys must no longer be fueled by the lives of men; I had to cement that truth in our statutes.
Standing at the podium, I proclaimed with resonance:
"Labor is dignity, and dignity begins with safety."
The words tasted grand, making me feel for a moment like some titan of ideology.
To the onlookers, perhaps that is exactly what I am.
In any case, the core intent is blunt: the age of grinding human flesh through sixteen-hour shifts is over.
Even God rested on the seventh day; to demand seven days of labor from a human being is nothing short of malicious.
I hammered it into law: eight hours a day, five days a week. Overtime is permitted only as a paid choice of the worker. Safety inspections are now both routine and unannounced, layered and rigorous.
The old bureaucratic charades—where one creates a phony chart just to secure a stamp—will pass no longer.
To enforce this, I established the new Department of Labor Safety. Its inspectors, clad in grey wool coats and carrying heavy black iron briefcases, will descend upon every factory and mine.
If necessity dictates, they will collar the representatives of the Factory Soviets and halt the lines until compliance is met.
A right to shut down operations, mandatory improvement orders, and quarterly reports of accidents—these three were bundled as one.
The people clapped, but through their applause, I heard the echoes of ancient screams.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York, where greed locked sixteen-year-old girls inside the flames. Aberfan in Wales, where a black mountain of coal devoured a village in a dark catastrophe. The Rana Plaza in Dhaka, where the deafening apathy of owners sent workers into a crumbling death trap. And the Sampoong Department Store—a massacre born of capitalistic disregard for safety.
Whenever regulations became 'inconvenient,' it was always the common folk who paid the price in flesh.
I will not allow this world to repeat such folly.
Thus, we granted our inspectors full authority.
Some Factory Soviet representatives resisted, faces turning beet-red, decrying lost productivity, missed deadlines, and ruined contracts.
Perhaps their position is the labor position as well; now that the factories are their own, more production theoretically means more rubles in their wallets.
But I shook my head.
That Ford adopted an eight-hour shift and sold more automobiles is the most elementary knowledge found on the first page of any textbook.
Grinding a man for eight extra hours may hold for a month, but it ruins a year. Do not treat the human body like a replaceable part.
We are not creating a factory to produce cheaply and quickly; we are building a society to endure safely and long.
This is not the romance of a revolutionary; it is the calculation of a planner.
A crippled hand lowers productivity; death steals away skill; a momentary lapse collapses the entire process.
Revolution may have been won with blood, but it shall not be maintained by it.
I then turned my eyes to the countryside.
Revolution is not crafted only where gunfire rings in the cities.
If the villages lack bread, the cheers of the city turn to resentment in an instant.
Thus, I launched the rural revitalization project.
We pushed ahead on two axes: collective farm mechanization and the campaign for the improvement of daily life.
I gave it a name:
New Roads, New Roofs, New Machinery.
In other words:
The Saemaul Movement.
It had to be catchy, simple to speak, and easy to grasp.
In the cities, the Youth League (Komsomol) and technical cadres descend into the countryside every weekend to pave roads, dig drainage ditches, and lay bridge foundations.
They write the new names of villages over the crumbling maps of the old engineering corps.
Where three red dots mark the map, tool warehouses, communal baths, and dining halls emerge.
We install electricity first.
On the day the utility poles enter a village, I wanted to hear those stories of elders whispering, 'This is a sign the world is ending! The sun has risen again at night!'
We do not enforce collective farms with a heavy hand.
We have never advocated for Stalin-style forced collectivization—a system that failed at mechanization and ended up with lower productivity than before.
The fields are managed collectively; the harvest is distributed according to work volume and skill.
The machinery rests in the hands of the public—the Agricultural Soviet—and its use is free.
We mandated the installation of Joint Machinery Management Centers for every Agricultural Soviet.
Tractors, combines, threshers, drills, water pumps—these tools are never transferred to private individuals.
Farmers will enter seasonal schools to master advanced agricultural technologies; upon completion, they are assigned to the management centers, and the Soviet is granted the machines.
We must provide a physical, experiential realization that machines are not stealing their jobs, but protecting their lives and boosting their income.
To ensure agriculture does not torture the farmer, and the state does not bleed the rural life dry—that is the virtue of this project.
The seasons do not wait.
Let us imagine for a moment.
A young man, coaxing the engine of a tiller to run the water pump, asks me:
"If we only pave roads like this, will our village also become a city?"
I would shake my head.
"No. Your village will become a good village. But a city is a city, and a village is a village. What matters is that, wherever you live, you can hold your head high."
New roofs stop the rain, new roads keep feet from sinking into the mire, and new machinery increases output while ensuring the farmer's health.
Thus, I allow them to straighten their backs and lift their heads higher, one step at a time.
And at last, I am able to bring forth the words I have cherished for so long.
The 1st Five-Year Economic Development Plan.
The name alone makes my heart swell.
The Georgian with the mustache... are you watching?
The Austrian with the mustache is strictly excluded.
Of course, we have decided not to become the monster of shifting numbers that the original Soviet Union became.
The first principle is this:
The heavy industries later, the light industries first.
We begin with light industry.
Fabrics, soap, dyes, utensils, rubber, paper, food, and simple processing machinery.
We fulfill what the people immediately need.
Heavy steelmaking and massive shipbuilding are deferred to the second and third plans.
We depend on no one. We will wear shoes that fit our own feet.
The second is housing.
'A home is a right, not a privilege'—the sentence explains everything.
Noble reception rooms turned into public libraries, walls hung with hunting trophies now adorned with kindergarten murals.
We standardized our blueprints.
Small-family units, large-family units, elderly centers, newlyweds' quarters, communal laundry blocks, and medical clinics.
We will combine these modules to create super-apartments.
I can almost see the Bauhaus modernists waving from afar, and the social housing of Red Vienna clapping in relentless applause.
Existing aristocratic palaces are completely converted into museums, galleries, or People's Palaces for communal sports.
The central entrances of apartments receive wheelchair and stroller ramps; the corridors are equipped with fire-smoke shutters; and the rooftops are left clear for future solar arrays and helipads.
Every citizen deserves to live with as much dignity as any aristocrat.
The third is the transportation network.
Without roads, plans remain only on paper.
We will expand trams across the entire city and link north and south with wide-gauge rail.
We weave the country together—city to city, countryside to city, and village to village.
Transfers are free, boarding is on a monthly pass, travel is free for children, youth, and the Infected, with discounts for the elderly and veterans of war.
Trucks will carry goods, buses will carry students, and trams will carry life.
For every line, we have clearly mapped out what freight passes through: grain, medicine, cement, books, and frozen food.
Frozen food is the most vital cargo of all.
Ice cream is a matter of critical national importance.
Of course, this alone is not enough to guarantee the livelihood of all.
So, I announced the expansion of the rationing system.
The days when rationing meant only bread, sugar, and kerosene are over.
We are diversifying the items.
Sanitary pads, formula, hearing aids, and eyeglass lenses are all included.
If there is not enough salt, the side dishes are bland; without glasses, life itself is blurry.
The state must provide the things that raise the resolution of life.
And then, I brought out the words I had long prepared:
"Art is not the private possession of capitalists, nor is it the enemy of the worker. Art is our virtue."
Book ration coupons, concert tickets, mobile film vouchers, and theater passes for the growth of the cultural industry were tucked into the wallets of the people.
On the walls of village halls appear posters: [This week's recommended reads: Epic of Tomorrow, Medicine on the Frontlines, Design of the City].
I wanted the scene of a child heading home, holding an illustrated fairy tale book obtained with their father's ration coupon.
Next to the windows of the distribution centers are announcements for local theater performances; at the desks, applications for library cards are laid out.
The closer the distribution center becomes to being a starting point of satisfaction, the closer the revolution moves to the side of the people.
Of course, reform always stirs the nest.
When I restricted the power of political officers in the military to purely ideological instruction and inspection, several members of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs raised hell.
But after the General Meeting of the Soldiers' Soviet was held a few times, the very faces of the rank and file changed.
They were now determined to defend a democratic and just nation, and to protect the people with their full might.
The blood of Haymarket and the ukulele of the roses; the slow but persistent hands of the UAW; the shovels of the New Deal and the murals of the WPA; the first patient card of the UK's NHS.
Progress has always been maintained by trivial things in the field.
And we, too, shall follow that path of triviality.
Administration demands far more imagination than people suspect.
When the five-day workweek began, it felt as though the city were learning to smile again, albeit awkwardly.
Soccer balls with an unfamiliar bounce rolled through parks, and bands organized by factory workers took to the plazas to move the hearts of the people.
Trams ran their routes two or three times more; libraries were swarmed by people overflowed with a sudden zeal for learning.
Lacking smartphones and the internet, people naturally poured outside for communal activities.
Rest is a technology for recovering the body.
People who had been hunching over every morning are now straightening their spines, leaning back.
Such trivial happiness will sustain the momentum of our permanent revolution.
The Federal Urban Planning Commission reduced their sleep and made 'Standard Housing Blueprints' available to the public.
Anyone could view them, and anyone could leave their thoughts.
Construction workers' councils began attaching notes to the edges of the drafts:
"At this angle on the field, the roof will leak."
The architect, realizing their mistake, amends the drawing.
Within this interaction of everyone, progress accelerated.
Of course, even with this exhilaration, a small warning light remains inside me.
Reform inevitably makes enemies.
The old establishment hates reform.
Furthermore, the surrounding nations watch us like hawks.
But strangely, that warning light feels like the lights of a festival, like a spotlight illuminating me.
I know the danger, yet I smile.
I take my hands off the typewriter and look out the window.
The ventilation ducts on the factory roofs in the distance exhale white steam.
Today, that smell of steam reminds me of fresh bread.
Perhaps dinner at the administrative building is pancakes this evening.
I return to my paperwork.
Mines failing safety standards, relaxing rural electricity fees, intercity bus transfer coupons.
There is no end to the list of reforms, and every item on that list is filled with the names of people.
Each and every one of them accepts their ration coupons, flips the electric switch, sits on a tram, and looks out at the world.
I am out there in that world, and I have made my contribution to their smiles.
The responsibility is heavy, but today, it feels strangely light.
Perhaps this reform, which I drink instead of spirits, has finally made me drunk.
Tonight, somewhere, a night shift guard is standing watch, an official is settling the nightly distribution accounts, and someone is giving a name to their newborn.
In every such scene, the state intervenes just enough for happiness and retreats just enough for freedom.
I like that balance.
Neither the incompetent negligence of the liberals nor the arrogant interference of the authoritarians—it is exactly between the two.
As I close the window, I make one more promise to myself.
That if signs of failure appear, I will not cast blame elsewhere; and if the scent of success blossoms, I will be the first to share it.
If that is the promise, I believe the revolution will gladly listen.
I turn off the lights, and dream of tomorrow's blueprints.
Tomorrow's new roads, tomorrow's new roofs, tomorrow's new machines.
And tomorrow morning, the book that will rest in the hands of the child queuing at the distribution center.
The expression on their face the moment they open that cover.
And the boundless possibilities that child will unfold.
If only to see those possibilities, I will endure this tiring labor, over and over again.
And thus, with all these reform bills passed, November 10th finally arrived—the day of the by-elections to fill the 1,780 vacant seats in the expanded 2,080-seat legislature, excluding the original 300 members.