The training of new cadres for socialist industry from the ranks of the working class and the labouring people generally, cadres capable of providing social and political, as well as production and technical, leadership for our enterprises, is a cardinal task of the moment. Unless this task is fulfilled, it will be impossible to convert the U.S.S.R. from a backward into an advanced country, from an agrarian into an industrial country, into a country of electricity and metal, of machines and tractors.

The Industrial Academy is one of the most important workshops for training such cadres in our country. The first contingent of graduates of the Industrial Academy is its first arrow launched into the camp of our enemies, into the camp of production routine and technical backwardness. Let us hope that the new leaders of industry who are today quitting the walls of the Academy will display in practice exemplary labour enthusiasm and genuinely revolutionary activity in promoting a Bolshevik tempo of constructive work.

Greetings to the first graduates of the Industrial Academy, which is providing the country with a new Bolshevik detachment of leaders of our socialist industry, leaders fortified with technical knowledge.

J. Stalin

April 25, 1930

Pravda, No. 115,

April 26, 1930