The Siberian Bastion

SOVIET ASIA--Raymond Arthur Davies & Andrew J. Steiger-- Dial ($3).

Soviet Asia is a vast, vague question mark. There are rumors of gigantic new factories in its Far West and there are rumors of armed vigilance in its Far East. Few Americans know much about either. To Canadian Journalist Davies and U.S. Journalist Steiger, who have fellow-traveled there extensively, Siberia is far from vague. They regard it as the key to Allied victory.

Half a Continent. Soviet Asia is bounded on the west by the 2,000-mile watershed of the Ural Mountains and bends its breadth upon half the planet, to end within dory distance of Alaska. Siberia is almost half of Asia, and more than seven-eighths of the Soviet Union. To all but the Russians, and to most of them, it was for centuries as dark as Africa.

During the past 20 years Siberia has been the stage for one of the swiftest, most abrupt and feverish social and political developments the world has known. How massive that development may be, the rest of the world began to suspect when most of the industrial Ukraine went under, and Russia continued to arm herself from the Siberian arsenal.

The strength of Soviet Asia lies in its mineral resources, its rich agricultural production, its factories and its geographic position. Lying close to nine countries on three continents, it enters into "the military-strategic aspect of almost every front, excepting the Libyan and the Atlantic." Only at its extreme frontiers is Siberia really vulnerable.

The Urals are the chief seat of Soviet Asia's industrial power, "the inner bastion of Russian defense." The Magnitogorsk Steel Mill, which since 1936 has produced the cheapest pig iron in Russia, supports a mushroom metropolis of 200,000. The Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant, the world's biggest, now turns out tanks and armored cars. Twenty years ago Ekaterinburg, where the last Tsar and his family were shot in a cellar, was a city of 25,000. Now renamed Sverdlovsk, it is the junction of seven railroad lines, has a population of 450,000.

Western Siberia, stretching from the Urals to the Yenisei River, is the least vulnerable area in Russia. Machinery made in its "gigantic new plants" supplies the farms and the factories of most of Soviet Asia. In the Krasnoyarsk Territory (still only 12% explored) are 154 coal beds totaling an estimated 670 billion tons. There are another 500 billion tons at Kuznetzk, producing 20,000,000 tons a year. Within 100 miles of Kuznetzk there are an estimated 500,000,000 tons of iron ore. In 1912 the total commercial output for the Novosibirsk Region was $33,000,000, and the products were mainly agrarian. In 1937 the total was $533,000,000, and the products were mainly industrial.

Kazakhstan is the terminus of an ancient (and improved) silk and spice trail which, in the authors' opinion, has been even more important to China than the Burma Road. Kazakhstan is first in the Soviet Union in copper mining, second in tin and gold, third in coal and petroleum. In the south, kok-sagyz, a rubber-yielding dandelion, is Russia's No. 2 source for rubber.*

The Siberian Arctic, until recently a grim prospect even for an Eskimo, has begun to yield to plane, radio, icebreaker.

In 1941 the icebreaker Krassin smashed out a 6,000-mile Arctic sea route (Arch-angel-to-Seattle) between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This northern sea route is now open only three to five months of the year. But new freighters of 10,000 tons are being built and "super icebreakers" of 50,000 horsepower and 24,000 tons are projected.

Siberia's Far East extends 3,450 air miles. Its coastline is nearly twice that long. The Manchukuoan frontier alone is as long as Europe's Eastern Front. The Trans-Siberian railroad has been double-tracked all the way to Vladivostok, but is extremely vulnerable. If it were cut, the chief cities -- Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Komsomolsk--would be isolated. Further north two new lines are being rushed. Biggest industrial enterprise in the Far East is the Chapcherginsk Tin Combinat, which produces 65% of all Soviet tin. No. 1 industrial center is Komsomolsk, where the Amur Steel Works turn out more than 750,000 tons of finished steel products per year.

Military Strength in the Far East is anybody's guess. Authors Davies & Steiger believe that half the Russian air force is held there, that the Far Eastern Red Army has not been appreciably drained for war in the west. Naval information is even vaguer than military, but in 1939 Russia's Pacific Fleet was reported to consist of 18 destroyers, 90 submarines, 80 coastal motorboats, 32 gunboats, 75 mosquito boats.

If Japan were to hold the Soviet Coast and the Chukot Peninsula, opposite Alaska, she would dominate the North Pacific, and Alaska would be impotent. Meanwhile the Allies hold both jaws of the pincers; the authors urge that they use them.

Few items in this Siberian inventory will surprise U.S. readers more than the report of large oilfields in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. If true, the real defensibility of the Siberian bastion may well depend on those fields. For it is generally believed that 85% of Russia's oil is in the Caucasus fields; that if the Germans conquer this oil even the Siberian military, industrial and agricultural machine will break down.

The Literary Life

Man With a Hoe. Ambrose Bierce once told Edwin Markham that The Man with the Hoe would one day kill him. Instead the poem made Poet Markham $250,000 before he died (of natural causes) at 87. It also made him the idol of a small army of would-be biographers who have besieged Son Virgil Markham, a mystery writer, for the privilege of writing the poet's life. Each claimed that Poet Markham had authorized him to write his official biography.

Among the claimants Virgil Markham counted two literary scholars, a college student, two feminine "appreciators," a former collaborator and "rabid admirer." Most persistent was Mrs. Florence Hamilton, of Wellesley Hills, Mass., with whom Virgil Markham has exchanged subacid letters in the New York Times. Mrs. Hamilton not only claims that Poet Markham authorized her to write The Intellectual Biography of Edwin Markham. She also claims that she possesses the original manuscript of The Man With the Hoe. Another "original" was bought by a private dealer for $700 several years ago. Virgil Markham owns a third "original."

Woman with a Hoe. Every few weeks somebody in the U.S. wonders what Gertrude Stein is doing.

Fortnight ago (in a letter Writer Therese Bonney published in Vogue) Gertrude told. Part of the time she hoes potatoes in the little peasant village of Billignin par Belley Ain in Unoccupied France. Food is scarce. The peasants idolize her: she is one expatriate who did not run away from defeated France. She is also writing a novel, called Mrs. Reynolds. Both Hitler and Stalin are in it. Gertrude has already written 25 pages. Alice B. Toklas is typing them. Gertrude believes the novel will not be finished for some time. Wrote Gertrude: "You know I did start to write about how America looks to Europe I did a little bit, and then I began to put it in a novel I am doing now, and so I did not go on with it, it might be fun to do, what do you think, well anyway the nightingales are singing and the frogs, and we are gardening and the potatoes are coming up and we love you a lot, we do."

The Roosevelt Generation

MUD ON THE STARS--William Bradford Huie--L. B. Fischer ($2.75).

This novelized autobiography is a confused, cynical, sharply intelligent scenario of a young man's struggle to tie himself to a set of beliefs with which he can live at peace. It is also a somewhat garish finger-painting of the genesis of a New Dealer.

Garth Lafavor of Garth's Island, 150-year-old Tennessee Valley plantation, started off by believing in the eternal rightness of Garth's Island. Its 3,000 acres supported 20 Garth families of various blood relationships, and 52 families of Garth sharecroppers.

He discovered the New Deal when the Civil Works Administration "kidnapped" some of the poorer and lazier Garth Negroes and put them on relief. Later he saw his way of life disappear forever when the Tennessee Valley Authority forced the Garths to sell out, made the plantation a lake behind one of the TVA's dams.

Five years on a Birmingham newspaper left Garth with a weird jumble of contemporary catchwords. For a while he was a New Dealer himself. He dallied with the Birmingham Reds (especially with Millionaire Comrade Adeline Reed, who had revolutionary and biological fervor. He turned against them after watching their tactics in a steel strike.

Appointment of Hugo Black to the U. S. Supreme Court turned Garth into a fascist. When the fascists murdered Comrade Adeline, Garth became a New Dealer again. Back in Tennessee Valley, he got a job with the TVA, set up housekeeping with his childhood sweetheart in one of TVA's model subdivisions, found his final faith in the hope that "all the forces for good [are] marshaled under one banner."

Author Huie, now associate editor of the American Mercury, has written one of the best novels about the "Roosevelt Generation," might have written a better one if he were not so close to his subject. As a rudely realistic story of what has happened to the Tennessee Valley and to Alabama under the New Deal, his novel is an exciting footnote to current history.

In fact, some readers may feel that Author Huie has mistaken his calling, that he is a better reporter than novelist.

* Last spring the U.S. Government bought 100 lb. of kok-sagyz seed, in conducting experiments with it in Connecticut.

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