I. What story is the passage taken from? How does it fit into it?

II. What did the girl look like as she hurried to the painter's studio? What do you know about her from the rest of the story?

III. What city is described in the passage? What similes help you guess? What do you know about the city?

XXIV

Read the text and comment on it. What is your idea of a future city?

CITIES OF THE FUTURE

The subject of future cities is now new. Thomas More and Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky wrote of them in their time as cities of happiness and social harmony. Writers of fantastic tales dreamed of them as they tried to peer into the future. Yet the world kept changing and the technical means of solving the numerous tasks facing mankind also changed. Today cities of the future are already emerging before our very eyes.

What will future cities be like? How large will they be? There is no unanimous opinion on this subject.

This is how Alexander Kazantsev, the well-known Soviet science fiction writer, sees Moscow in the future.

"There is no city in the accepted sense of the word. Only the scientific and administrative centres have remained. Muscovites will live, in the main, many kilometres away from the centre, in well-appointed cottages and houses in the lap of nature. The entire

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territory will be turned into a huge forest-park. Synthetic food factories will make it possible to free huge areas at present under cultivation."

The picture he presents is quite an attractive one. For it would really be wonderful to break out of the stone walls that have been pressing upon man for ages and return to nature.

Most architects, however, hold a different point of view. They are for the city, but a city of every possible comfort and one that offers reliable protection from all the unfavourable effects of the outer world. The arguments they adduce in favour of further urbanization are well founded. First of all, one must take into account the prospect of a steadily increasing world population.

Population growth forces cities to grow outwards, and in the opinion of some scientists is liable in the ultimate end to lead to the emergence of a single gigantic planet-polis, a world wide city. In Europe something of this kind can be expected in 150 years.

The Soviet Union with its huge spaces is not in danger of such a rapid merging of towns and cities. But in principle the problem has also become actual.

What is the alternative? First of all to go over to vertical structures. The project designed by engineer Dryazgov consists of a truncated cone having a base with a diameter of 34 km and a height of 1,5 km. It is capable of accommodating 54 million people in the housing quarters encircling its outer surface in tiers. Five gigantic cities of this kind, each covering an area not exceeding that of present-day Moscow, could house nearly the entire Soviet population.

Vertical cities are not only many-storey, structures linked at ground level. They will be connected at several levels, which makes it possible to speak of spatial town-building, one of the most promising in Soviet architecture. This building principle makes it possible to save much of the land. Vertical cities will be located amidst fields and forests, the surrounding world will be one of abundant verdure and have a pure and healthy atmosphere.

Vertical cities can now grow not only upwards but also downwards. Underground urbanization is an effective means of overcoming congestion in big cities. That is why underground construction is making steady headway in the USSR: new metro lines are being laid; garages and high-speed municipal transport are going underground; cinema, theatres, exhibition halls, shops, etc are also submerging.

Scientific and technological progress offers diverse means of economizing such a valuable thing as land. These include intensification of agriculture and the development of chemical and microbiological foodstuffs, aquaculture or sea-farming, "miniaturization" of industry, and new architectural solutions for housing areas. Moscow already has several many-storey buildings lacking aground floor. They are built on U-like supports occupying exceedingly small areas thereby leaving more free space for other purposes.

(From "Sputnik", No. 12, 1977)

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^*Exercises to texts I-XII are to be done with Part I of the textbook; exercises to texts XIII-XXIV -with Part II.

^*The Royal Academy of Arts

Part III

UNIT FOURTEEN

TEXT

THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS

When the Great October Socialist Revolution brought the world's first government of workers and peasants to power in Russia in 1917, there were few people who fully realized the significance of this event and the impact it would have on human history.

now its significance is unmistakably clear. Above all, because this was the first practical confirmation of the Marxist-Leninist thesis that socialism would inevitably triumph. What was a hypothesis before October 1917 has now become a real, tangibe fact. The working class and all the working people of the Soviet Republics, led by the Communist Party, succeeded in accomplishing the truly titanic task of building a new social order.

The birth of the new, socialist society, a society free from exploitation and oppression, became a cardinal factor in the revolutionary remaking of the world.

A steadfast desire for a just and democratic peace is the fundamental, unchanging Leninist foreign policy of the Soviet Government. From its inception it has been pursuing a policy of peaceful coexistence with countries having different social systems; it has been working unremittingly for disarmament and for collective security system. No changes in the international situation and no plotting by enemies of peace have been able to force the Soviet people to veer away from their main line of struggle for peace and progress. Soviet foreign policy has followed a consistent road from Lenin's Decree on Peace in 1917 to the Programme of Peace developed by the 24th and the 25th Congresses of the CPSU (1971 and 1976 respectively). The 26th CPSU Congress and its foreign policy programme reaffirmed loyalty to these Leninist principles. The persistent efforts of the CPSU and the Soviet Government to implement the Peace Programme, supported by many millions of people around the globe, bring increasingly fruitful results.

Ever since its inception the Soviet Union has been a powerful internationalist revolutionary force, a reliable ally of the communist and working-class movement. It has always supported various democratic, progressive movements throughout the world.

All honest-minded people the world over know and remember that the Soviet Union was the main obstacle in the way of 'German fascism's drive to dominate the world; it bore the main burden of the war, suffered the greatest losses and played the decisive part in the defeat of Hitlerite Germany and militarist Japan.

Socialism's impact on world history is now based primarily on

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two factors. These are: first, the circumstance that a developed socialist society has already been built in the Soviet Union, and that work is now going ahead here to build a communist society; second, the existence of the powerful socialist community, the world socialist system, which is exerting more and more of a decisive influence on the entire course of world events.

The Soviet Union has registered impressive socio-economic and cultural progress. Present-day Soviet economy is distinguished by production on a gigantic scale, high and stable growth rates and continuous technological improvement in all sectors. Hundreds of new factories and mills are put into operation every year. More and more of the natural riches of Siberia, the Soviet Far Eastern areas and other parts of the country are being placed in the service of the people. Work has already begun on the comprehensive Food Programme adopted at the May 1982 Plenary Meeting of the CPSU Central Committee. The implementation of the Programme will not only provide the country's population with foodstuffs, but it will also ensure the progress of the entire national economy.

The Soviet Union is a major motive force in scientific and technological progress. Here the world's first nuclear power-station and the first nuclear-powered ship, the ice-breaker Lenin, were built. A trailblazer in outer space, the Soviet Union put the first artificial earth satellite into orbit and was the first to send spacecraft into interplanetary space, beyond the field of terrestrial gravitation. A Soviet citizen, Yuri Gagarin, was the first man jn space.

The Soviet people are enjoying the fruits of socialism more and more fully. The basic principle of the Communist Party's policy - "Everything for the sake of man, for the benefit of man" - is consistently being put into practice. Unemployment was done away with in the Soviet Union in 1930. Nor is there any inflation here-The prices of the staple foods and transport services, and also rent are stable and are, as a rule, the lowest in the world, real incomes are steadily rising, housing construction is being carried out on a huge scale. Emphasis is placed on promoting the health services, science and culture, on bringing the highest cultural values within the reach of the people at large and providing conditions for a truly harmonious development of the human personality.

In the Soviet Union the working masses are being drawn on an increasingly broad scale into day-to-day work of governing the country. Soviet socialist democracy, which established genuine rule by the people, equality and freedom for everyone for the first time in history, is receiving further development.

The multinational Soviet Union demonstrates to the world the triumph of Lenin's nationalities policy, a policy of equality and brotherhood of the peoples; it demonstrates the birth of new harmonious relations, relations of friendship and co-operation among classes andsocia 1 groups, nations and nationalities, and the rise of a new historical community of people, the Soviet people.

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The socialist social system, the unity of interests of all the people and their common ideology serve as the basis for the rise of new forms of human relations. These constitute the Soviet socialist way of life, which is the opposite of the bourgeois way of life founded on exploitation and oppression of man by man.

The building of communism in the Soviet Union is going ahead in a close alliance with the fraternal socialist countries. It is a process inseparable from the world-wide revolutionary process, from the struggle for world peace.

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EXERCISES