MUSHROOM GROWTH

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 264, 3 August 1932, Page 9

MUSHROOM GROWTH

Industrialising Russia London, July 14. Great industrial centres springing up like mushrooms where formerly were hamlets constitute one of the striking visible results of the five-year plan, reports the Moscow correspondent of "the “Manchester Guardian.” One of the most notable is at Khibinogorsk, within the Arctic Circle, where only 100 people lived in 1929. Now there are 40,000. Stalinabad, formerly a village near the Afghanistan frontier, and now the capital of the Republic of Tadjikistan, has a population of 60,000. The most impressive mushroom city is Magnitogorsk, where the largest steel plant in Europe is being constructed and is yielding the first pig-iron. An obscure village In 1929, it has now a population approaching 200,000. Kuznetzk, in the coal basin of Central Siberia, shows the greatest regional development It has four rapidlygrowing towns. Stalinsk has 150,000 people, with a steel plant using Magnitogorsk ore; Prokopievsk, the population of which was 10,000 in 1926, now has 100,000. Kemerovno is growing similarly. Sudzhensk leaped from a village before the revolution to a centre with 50,000 inhabitants to-day. Another city of 100,000 people has grown around Dniepstrol, with its hydro-electric plant and with steel and aluminium Industries ; while the centre of Arctic development is Port Igarka, at the mouth of the Yenisei. These industrial towns ate in various stages of transition, and generally are short of everything, from vegetables to housing and sanitation. Many are situated in bleak and un-prepossessing-localities. Taken altogether, with their colossal shift of population, they are comparable only' to the early growth of English industrial towns and the settlement of America west of.the Mississippi.