BRATSK-The World’s Biggest Power Plant

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31125, 30 July 1966, Page 5

BRATSK-The World’s Biggest Power Plant

(By

PAUL WOHL

in the “Christian Science Monitor’)

J)EEP in the Siberian Taiga the Soviets have built the world’s largest hydro-electric plant—twice the size of Grand Coulee. It is their own supercolossal version of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

.All around, from the hinterland of the North Pacific to West Siberia, power giants of similar proportions are going up. Some have been completed.

But the biggest, the most advanced, and the most characteristic of these power giants is the one at Bratsk on the Angara, the fast and mighty grey-blue river flowing out of Lake Baikal into the Arctic Sea.

In December, 17 of the power plant’s 20 225,000-kilowatt turbines were working. Originally Bratsk was to have a capacity of more than 6,000,000 kilowatts, but the plan was scaled down to 4,500,000. This target was reached in February.

New industries are rising nearby. And, most significant of all, a carefully-planned city has arisen and grown to a population of more than 100,000 in 12 years. Here some of Russia’s initial dreams have come true.

Western tourists now can fly to Bratsk from Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia, a sprawling low-built city of about 400,000 dating from Ssarist days. Bratsk is less than 400 miles north-west of Irkutsk.

Thick forests separate the two cities. A few village dot the riverbanks—small log cabins helter-skelter—and at a distance loom the large stable of collective farms. Here is the mark of Soviet communism: organisation before comfort, bigness in enterprise before man has taken root.

Less than 100 miles north of Irkutsk, dammed-up water has pushed back the forest. The tributaries of the Angara have filled up the valleys, forming arms of a still invisible sea. Manpower Scarce A little farther are large rectangular clearings where the forest has been uprooted to give land to the some 250 settlements which were displaced when the rivers were dammed up. About one-third of the money spent on the power plant went into such resettlement and reclamation projects plus road work. In European Russia the Soviets would have been less considerate, but in the heart of Siberia manpower is scarce. People willing to till the land or to tend livestock are even scarcer, and populous China is near.

The old Bratsk, a tiny fishing village, was swallowed up by the reservoir or inland sea. Its name was derived from the Buryats, native nomads, who live along the Angara and whom the Russians called "brat” or brother. The new Bratsk on the shore of the inland sea has more than 120,000 inhabitants from all parts of the Soviet Union—but predominantly Slavs, with Russians and Ukrainians the largest ethnic group. By 1970, Greater Bratsk is expected to be a city of 300,000.

Planned as a modern socialist town, the new Bratsk started in 1954. The first large building to go up was a school. When the town was in its second year and the number of construction workers had just reached 1800, there

already were six schools for 1200 children and nine kindergartens for 400.

No Time To Play

Because many of the young people who came to Bratsk had not finished school, evening courses were set up. Ivan and Sasha had to attend with a minimum of time left over for carousing. The party and the Komsomol, the Communist youth organisation, saw to that with rewards for the “good guys” and effective persuasion. Whoever was not fit was blackballed, remained on a cot in a tent, or was shipped home. There was no livelihood for a Jessie James in the Communist taiga. Today Bratsk has a branch of the Polytechnical University of Irkutsk. There are many parks, theatres, playgrounds, and a large stadium. Most people live in large apartment houses, as in the suburbs of Moscow or Kiev. Only Bratsk is not quite so monotonous. There are hints of Western architecture, which reached Siberia by way of East Germany and Poland. Exchange of architects and engineers and extended visits of technical delegations among bloc countries, which gained scope only after Stalin, have left a mark.

The Bratsk power plant is a major engineering feat. For years the building of the dam across the fast-flowing ice-cold and deep Angara river made front-page news in the Soviet press. There were mishaps and losses, plenty of drama, and acts of heroism described by some of the country’s best writers. Interest Displayed The Soviets are conditioned to take a more sustained and lively interest in engineering developments than the Westerners. Even now that the power plant is practically completed, the story of the growth of Bratsk is thought of as an epic. No less than the Soviet Union’s onetime poet laureate, Yevgeny Yestushenko, spent several months in Bratsk the subject of a long poem.

Bratsk is one of the costliest Soviet investments. Billions of rubles were sunk into the project At one point Mr Khrushchev, on this return from a tour of Siberia where young workers in Bratsk had brashly

spoken back to him, wondered whether the whole thing had been a good idea. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is how the Soviets managed to get more than 100,000 people to go to Bratsk, especially in the beginning. Then it was an unknown spot in the lonely taiga, where the bear and the tiger roamed, and clouds of gnats turned the place into an inferno. Not to mention the rigours of the Siberian winter.

Although Siberia has a quick labour turn-over and in recent years suffered a net out-flow of workers to European areas of the Soviet Union, Bratsk has continued to grow and manpower is fairly steady.

Built By Volunteers

One of the reasons for the success of Bratsk was that it was built after Stalin by volunteer labour and not by convicts. This meant that much more money had to be made available for adequate lodgings and cultural facilities. The people of Bratsk are better supplied with food and consumer goods than in an average Soviet city. Another factor that attracts people to Bratsk is the possibility of building one’s own house in the suburbs. Land and building materials are free, tools are made available by a co-operative, and neighbours help each other more than in other parts of the country. In Bratsk the old and the new Russia have become one. In planned order, but individually shaped, twofamily log houses with neat little gardens have gone up in the suburbs. The old Russian art of wood carving has revived. Window frames and doors are painted in bright colours, something one hardly sees any more in European Soviet villages. Earnings are at least 20 per cent higher than in the European Soviet Union and the premium paid for living in North Siberia increases during the first five years every year by one tenth. Travel during vacations is free to any point regardless of distance, a fact which accounts for the many people from Bratsk on the Black Sea coast and in subtropical Transcaucasia.

Idealism enters the picture, too. Appeals for volunteer construction workers for Bratsk in the early years made no bones about the hard life and the temporary priva-

tion the young people would have to face. But the argument that migration to Bratsk “serves the fatherland and the people” and so-called revolutionary romanticism also had a pull. They still have, as the writer found out in many talks with young Soviets, including some who were wayward by party standards. Ideas Borrowed As in all new cities of this kind, youth prevails. The average Bratsker is 25. It is interesting to note that the Soviets borrowed a few ideas when they built Bratsk. Professor W. A. Krotov of the Far Eastern branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Irkutsk paid a long visit to the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1961. His report on his findings contains none of the customary Communist cliches. Professor Krotov especially praised the absence of theoretical verbiage in the reports of the T.V.A. and was impressed by the multi-purpose character of the project, the effectiveness of capital investment, the protection of nature, educational work among the farmers, transportation, and tourist developments. Why did the Soviets choose to build the Bratsk power giant in inaccessible, almost uninhabited eastern Siberia? And why are they building other power giants all around? It does not seem to have been quite as big a mistake as Mr Khrushchev at one time seemed to think. The old political idea of course is that Siberia is much too thinly inhabited. Siberia and the Soviet Far East together, an area almost twice as large as the United States, have only about 25,000,000 inhabitants, more than half of which are in Western Siberia, with less than 2,000,000 square miles. Between one-half and two-thirds of the population live in towns around the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Development Yet Siberia is the treasure house of the Soviet Union. To get people to move to Siberia was the policy of the Tsars, just at it is the policy of the Soviets. The economic purpose of the new Siberian power giants is to speed up industrial development. In the case of Bratsk it is first of all the chemical industry, especially wood chemistry. Only 5 per cent of the timber felled in the Soviet Union is processed chemically as compared with 20 per cent in the United States and more than 40 per cent in Sweden, which supplied the equipment for the super-modern Bratsk cellulose plant. Light metal and nuclear developments also play a big role. Both are strictly secret industries in the Soviet Union; both consume vast amounts of power.

Although the Soviet Union is rich in bauxite and alum, half a million tons of bauxite are imported every year from Greece. Imports of bauxite from Hungary are not listed in Soviet foreign-trade statistics, nor have any figures on aluminum production been published. Most of the Soviet Union's aluminum industry is believed to be in Siberia. According to A. N. Lavrishev’s Manual of Soviet Economic Geography, Moscow, 1964, Siberia by 1970 is expected to supply 71 per cent of all Soviet aluminium. It already supplies 88 per cent of all refined copper and 48 per cent of Soviet steel. Aluminium The Bratsk power plant now produces at a rate of about 25 billion kilowatt hours a year. Nearly one-sixth of this huge power output would be needed to electrolyse 200,000 tons of aluminium. (United States aluminium production in 1964 was 2,250,000 tons; the Soviets produce much less, but are in a hurry to step up this important industry.) Seen against this background, the Siberian power giants make sense indeed, not to mention the huge power consumption for purposes of nuclear fission.

Power also is needed for the projected development of a large machine industry, including ordnance. In the heyday of SinoSoviet friendship Soviet economists anticipated that a part of Siberia’s industrial output would find a market in China. No-one can say what the future will bring. The fact remains that Moscow continues to develop Siberia’s vast power resources on a scale for which there are no parallels in the West In the current five-year plan alone (1966-1970) 10 thermal power plants are to be built with more than 10 times Bratsk’s present target capacity. The water-power projects are tremendous. Four more water-power giants are planned on the Angara alone, which together with the existing water-power stations in Bratsk and Irkutsk are to have a total capacity of 14 million kilowatts, roughly equal to one-third of the water-power capacity of the United States in 1963. Even bigger projects have been worked out for the Lena river.

Seen in long-range perspective, Siberia certainly is a land with a great future. Even today it is a mainspring of Soviet strength and its industrial development is one of communism’s main achievements.