PRODUCTIVE AREAS

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22512, 16 December 1947, Page 5

PRODUCTIVE AREAS

SIBERIA_TODAY MODERN INDUSTRY NAMELESS NEW CITIES Conditions in Siberia today are vastly different from those graphically described three or four decades ago by John Foster Fraser in his book, “The Real Siberia”. This Soviet Union, unknown to the outside world, has built or is building 100 industrial centres —many so new as to be still “nameless cities” —and an immense Siberian industrial region which will include a Russian “Oak Ridge” for atomic energy development. So reports Elsworth L. Raymond, former chief of the United _ States Army’s Russian economic section, in the magazine United Nations World. This gigantic effort to transform wilderness areas into important new production centres, he says, has been stepped up by the current Five-Year Plan. Just as the Tennessee Valley Authority helped make possible the United States’ atomic centre, Oak Ridge, so the Russians plan to secure power from the rapid Angara River in the Irkutsk region for their economic projects, the article said. Mr. Raymond wrote that “these cities are so new they do not appear on even the latest maps of the U.S.S.R. In fact, only a few of the 100 new cities have as yet been given any designation at all. The rest are known by the collective name Bczimyanka—-literally ‘nameless city’—until Soviet planners can dream up new variations of Stalin’s and Molotov’s names for their enlarged gazetteers.”

Industrial Giants

Declaring the cities are not being built for propaganda or to impress travelleis, Mr. Raymond said: “They are built to accommodate huge new factories, hy-dro-electric plants, or to provide dwellings for hundreds of thousands of workers from all over Russia, who have been transplanted from the newly-de-veloped or discovered sources of raw materials. “While many of these new and nameless cities are little more than conglomerations of huts around the construction sites of future factories, no one who knows the facts can minimise the mighty surge of industrial progress in the Soviet Union today. Remember that Magnitogorsk, now the largest steel centre in Europe, was an empty space on a windy steppe two short decades ago. It will not take as long to complete Serevouralsk, its far bigger offspring to the north.” At least nine of the new cities are planned along exceptionally elaborate lines to rank with the major industrial cities of the Soviet Union, the writer said-. Six of them are in sufficiently advanced stages of construction to be given names. Three others are still nameless. Vast New Siberian Region

While much of the city building represents localised industrial expansion, the Soviet Union is also creating a vast new Siberion industrial union of approximately 308,000 square miles, Mr. Raymond said, adding: “This new region with its numerous nameless cities of various sizgs extends from Lake Baikal to the Mongolian frontier and the lower regions of Tanguska River. Its geographical and administrative centre is Irkutsk”.

Virtually devoid of modern Industries today, this region is expected by 1955 to rank in importance with the large industrial areas of the Soviet Union in Russia—the Donetz Basin in the Ukraine and the Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia. The article continued:

“This new region gains particular significance from that fact that it is designated as the geographical and industrial centre of the Soivet Union’s atomic energy development. It will include the Russian ‘Oak Ridge’ to be built on the banks of the rapid Angara River, utilising the waters of a kind of ‘Angara Valley Authority’ just as the Manhattan Project depended on the TVA.”

The article described the whole region as representing the fruition of Prime Minister Joseph Stalin’s dream of making Siberia the' real heart of the Soviet Union.

Animal Husbandry

Im; spite of the progress of agriculture —and this has been vast, including gardening and fruit farming—animal husbandry is still the principal occupation in Badakhshan, as elsewhere in the Pamirs, which border on Afghanistan and the State of Pakistan. Vast herds of yak, sheep, ghats, camels and horses grazed in the mountain pastures, and the Five-Year Plan calls for 200,000 head of livestock by 1950. Badakhshan is also very rich in minerals, and maybe it will be industrialised at no distant date.