MOTHER SIBERIA WAS TAMED

Grey River Argus, 18 March 1942, Page 7

MOTHER SIBERIA WAS TAMED

By

Rupert Lockwood.

In. the days before 1917,. it was said that Prussia was a military barracks and Russia was a prison. Trains, bursting with oppressed humanity, crawled through the passes of the Urals, on their way to Czarist Siberia. Here the convicts were dumped at frozen wayside stations, to be lashed down into the Czars’ mine shafts in the manner of Pharaoh’s slaves.

Siberia was the cruel motherland, not only of political and economic convicts, but of primitive tribesmen. Sheepskins, birch-bark shoes or clogs, bear-skin coats of the Stone Age, made up the attire of the hunters, fishermen, horsemen and cam-el-drivers.

The wolves and bears seized those who lagged behind the tribe. The sick were never a problem. They died. Only the toughest of the tough survived the trials imposed by this barbaric Mother Siberia. OUTSTRETCHED HAND. In 1917, when conditions were no longer tolerable even for these tough Siberians, the Revolution flared. A hand was outstretched above the bloodied waters of Russia, like the hand that held the sword in the story of King Arthur.

This hand, the hand of Lenin, did not hold a sword. It offered Peace, Bread and Land. These things the people grasped firmly, as that legendary hand had grasped the sword of King Arthur.

The ferment of revolution affected the remotest village and tribal camp of Siberia.

One of these villages was 'Magnitaia, a group of Cossack huts, the gilded dome of a church and , a stream rising from the treeless steppe somewhere beyond the slopes of the Urals.

Magnitaia was not the only thing that rose above the steppe. There was also an outcrop of ironstone, untouched except for the < village smithy’s uses.

Soon the Cossacks and the wandering gipsies saw new factories, blast furnaces and blocks of flats arising. But Magnitaia needed men and women, as well as flats and factories, to win and smelt the iron, to turn it into machines, locomotives, tanks, guns.

THE BUILDERS.

The call went out for men, over the steppe, into the Arctic icelands, into the depths of the forests.

American, British, German and European-Russian engineers watched their human material arrive, by foot or by horse, by droshky or by the Jong stride of a Turcoman camel. Fishermen dropped their nets, hunters their primitive weapons of the chase. Some came in the skull caps of the horsemen of Genghiz Khan, leader of the Mongol horde that once invaded Europe.

To the American engineers, used to skilled workers driving up in motor cars, to the British engineers who came from the land of best artisans in the world, it was a nightmarish joke. These Siberians seemed to the foreigners to bark, whistle and mutter rather than speak in a civilised tongue.

Maybe, said the American engineers you could make skilled workers out of this illiterate rabble.

Maybe the moon was made of green cheese after all.

Maybe, said the Soviet engineers. But let’s get to work.

To the American engineers it was a poem of horror.

Buriats, Uzbeks, Ostiaks, and gypsies left precious machines to rust in rain, sun and snow. They ran machines too fast. They ran them too slow. They put up walls which fell down soon after.

When a new batch of tribesmen came into the steelworks and got their first sight of white-hot metal, of showering sparks, they ran like frightened hares back to the steppe, to the forests and the fishing streams. But they came back to have another try. NEW WORLD. The enthusiasm of the foreign engineers was champagne that evaporated before the broken machines. They left the Siberians to their expensive game. But the Soviet engineers carried on. And so did the tribesmen. Soon they had learned to build walls that did not fall down. Soon they learned how to work the machines.

The golden thread of Soviet creation appeared in the barbaric weave of Siberia.

Mother Siberia had lost her old cruelty. Mother Siberia had given birth to a new life, a new Soviet world.

■ The little village of Magnitaia is still there, huddled around its church and stream. Alongside it are the towering chimneys, furnaces and factories of the most modern metropolis in the world—Magnitogorsk. It all happened since 1928. Magnitogorsk now has universities, schools, tramcars, motor buses, traffic lights, More important to-day, it has tank, aeroplane and cannon factories —replenishments for the Red Army and Air Force.

It was progress so rapid that it was often painful. But the Soviet workers knew how necessary the progress was. They, above all others, understood the meaning of the brownshirted clowning in. Germany when others laughed. They did; not wait for a black cat to. cross Hitler’s path, or for Hermann Goering to break one of Frau Goering’s goldpated mirrors. Lenin had given them their slogan: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” OUR RAMPARTS. Magnitogorsk is only part of this heroic Soviet story. Modern Sverdlovsk, named after the Soviet leadei’ who won back the Urals from the Whites, towers above old Ekaterinburg. The Kouzbass, mighty Siberian coal centre, has grown alongside the little craters where the peasants scraped out coal with their hands.

The new cities of the Urals and Siberia stand between us, and the Nazi treadmill. For having built that barrier, those Siberians, those hunters and fishermen, who are now skilled and cultured workers, deserve more than our gratitude.

They deserve our immediate help