RUSSIAN GOLD

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 2, 4 January 1937, Page 3

RUSSIAN GOLD

HUGE OUTPUT FULFILLING A BOAST RICH FIELDS When the Director of the Gold Trust of the U.S.S.R., Comrade Serebrovsky, boasted' that he would soon overtake the output of gold of the Rand, men smiled. When he published figures showing that he had already attained half that amount, men were incredulous. When he maintained that figure, and even increased it, men began to feel uneasy. The statistics published by him for the year 1935 gave an output of 5,650,000 fine ounces, representing to-

day a value of something like £30,000,000 for the one year, writes Malcolm Burr in the "Daily Telegraph." The thing seems impossible. The whole output of the famous Lena goldfield for three-quarters of a century did not amount to more than double that. That is not all. Comrade Serebrovsky has boasted that by the end of the current year he will have pushed up the output to over 10,000,000 ounces. That is, he will really rival the Rand. What can be the explanation? From a familiarity with Russian methods dating back over a quarter of a century, including a winter spent on the rich goldfields of the Olekma-Vitim-plateau, generally known as the Lena, I believe that I can explain the phenomenon, or at least a substantial portion of it. SPEEDING-UP GOLD QUEST. I called upon M. Ozersky, director of

the Soviet trade delegation in London, to ask if he could supply me with any precise information. In particular I wished to know how much of the output was from alluvial workings and how much from reef mining. Being a commercial, not a technical, man he was not able to satisfy my curiosity. But he assured me that the greatest efforts had been made to speed up production of gold by the same general methods that had been used to speed up industrial production; that is, by encouraging miners and prospectors with privileges not otherwise obtainable, and enticing men of all sorts to join in the hunt for gold. Now Russian methods of gold-mining are not famed for their modernity. The engineers on the Lena, when I was there ten years ago, were intensely interested at the prospect of seeing dredges at work. The gold of the old imperial demesnes at Kara, in Eastern Siberia, were farmed out to tributors, or "pork-knockers," and all appliances used by them were of the most primitive description. It is generally known that gold occurs almost everywhere, even in sea water, but usually in a very attenuated condition. It is only in favourable spots that it is sufficiently concentrated to be workable at a profit. The exploitation of gold in river gravels and sands is one of the most ancient industries known to humanity. It dates from the Bronze Age beyond doubt, and probably from the neolithic period. The earliest allusion to the practice of recovering gold from the

bed of a stream does in fact comt from the U.S.S.R. It is in the legenc of the search by Jason, and hii Argonauts for the Golden Fleece, a; recorded centuries later by Strabo, whc gives a description of the methods em ployed by the "barbarians" to catrt the gold in troughs perforated with holes, and with the hairy skins of goati and sheep laid down in the beds of the streams to entangle ;:_e tiny flakes o: gold being washed dbwn. This was in Colchis and Phasis, tc which today we generally refer as the Western Caucasus. The skins were, ir fact, the forerunners of the lates metallurgical practice on the Rand where blanket strakes and curduroj .tables are used for the same purpose The mineral wealth of the Urals ha: been famous for centuries, but the golt worked here has been alluvial gold from the beds of streams and rivers though I understand that there is nov a certain amount of reef mining fo: gold in that miners' paradise. Although very large quantities o gold have been and still are being re covered from streams in other part of the world, the far greater part o the world's output of the preciou: metal is from mining proper, that is by underground operations. This i; the case, for instance, with the vas production of the Rand. The Bolsheviks have been prospect ing very energetically in the less ex plored ranges of their empire, and ver: probably they have revealed the pre sence of promising reefs in the Altai the Tian Shan, the Pamirs, in the Cau casus, and elsewhere. But to sugges •that it should be possible to develoi these within a few years seriously t< rival an old-established field is to show ignorance of the nature of the problem It is not there that I seek the kej to the riddle, but in that vast fores that sprawls right across the northerr belt of Asia, the gloomy taiga, some 3000 miles across from the west to th< Pacific coast in the east, and a thou sand northwards to the edge of th< Arctic tundra. ANVIL OF ASIA. Right in the middle of this almos boundless forest there is a river callec the Angara, whose icy crystal water: swirl down out of Lake Baikal in ; stream so turbulent that it defies ever the Siberian frost until the end o: January. That river flows over one o: the oldest parts of the surface of the earth, the anvil, as it were, upon whicl the Continent of Asia was forged. Here there has been time almost immeasurable for the operation of rain, snow, and frost to break up the rocks distintegrate them, wash down the debris, and concentrate the flakes oi gold in the streams. Some of these are on the surface today; some are buried beneath 100 ft or more of gravel and rubble, ground down by the glaciers. These are deep leads. For this reason the taiga is goldbearing almost throughout its extent, in some places extremely rich, as in the Lena goldfield, which is a fortnight's journey north of the TransSiberian railway and the River Angara, and that of Aldan, which is another three weeks' journey further north still. The taiga is a big place. It has clearly been the policy of the Soviet Government to encourage workers to get gold, to have it collected and brought to Moscow by hook or by crook. While the Englishman, or any European, looks upon the fundamental principle of all human activity as economic, and even the precious metal, gold it-

b self, can be worked and -won by us i only if it can be made to pay, with s the Soviets economic principles play a s very minor part. The fundamental: a principle with them is political. If - gold be required for political reasons, 1 as it always is, the question of cost and 1 profit is not taken into consideration, s Therefore, while for us the gold s boom, the rise in price from 84s to f about 140s an ounce, has brought into payability many a low-grade deposit, 3 in the U.S.S.R., all gold is worth works ing. There is no such thing as payi ability. All the gold possible must t be collected, regardless of cost—in money, in suffering, even in human life. f The gold seekers of Siberia are fine :. fellows, a stalwart race, who wrestle s with Nature in her grimmest moods, to 1 wrench a little of her buried gold, witli !, primitive methods and inadequate rei, sources. Sooner or later they all i leave their bones in the taiga, r Today, those men are "soldiers on the gold front." They are granted f special privileges, such as free railway - travel, relief from taxation, exemption 3 from various services, especially from £ forced labour in other departments or s in labour camps, and, above all, better :, food and more of it, if only they will 3 go out into the taiga and collect gold. t So they go gladly. Not only experienced tributors who know how to - pan gold—itself an art—and how to - build and use cradles and long toms, r but all the floating proletariat, for the - sake of the reward and, above all, in , that pathless forest a large measure of - personal freedom. t But that cannot go on for ever. The > amount of gold to be recovered thus is > finite. Large areas are already ex- ' hausted. The plateau of Tihon, that . divides the main goldfield of the Vitim ■ from the minor field called Svetloie, ; was worked out and abandoned befora i I spent Christmas there ten years ago. ! Diligent prospecting offered no hopa i that gold mining in the true sense— • that is, by drifting, or underground : mining—would last much longer on the Vitim, nor had the original reef ever been discovered. When I was there it was contemplated that they -would work out the deep leads completely in ! another two seasons, and the hope of the future lay in the dredges. CONFISCATED DREDGE. When the Soviets granted the con* cession to the English company, they had estimated a loss upon the ensuing season's operation of 3,000,000 roubles. That did not worry them much. When the company had delivered a dredge upon the scene—a most expensive business—then the Soviets struck. They cancelled the concession and confiscated the plant, including the dredge That this piece of barefaced robbery was carefully planned from deliberate policy I have no doubt. They were, in fact, quite cynical about it. On .New Year's Eve, 1925, a fancy dress ball was , organised on the Lena at mine headquarters at which prizes were given for propaganda. The most significant figure was a miner in full rig driving a Capitalist in a queer-looking old tall hat and frock coat. Upon the back of the Capitalist was a card bearing tha inscription in Russian: "Concession foi 30 Years! I don't think!"