Go East, Young Man!

Russia is an Asiatic country, and I myself am an Asiatic, Joseph Stalin once told a Japanese diplomat. "Our country is both European and Asiatic. The largest part of our territory lies on the Asian continent." said roly-poly First Party Secretary Khrushchev five months ago in India. Last week Stalin's heirs were showing increasing determination to make Asians out of millions of other Russians.

Some 1,200,000 Red army soldiers, ostensibly discharged as a gesture toward disarmament, were being urged to settle in the New Lands of the Soviet Far East. In the party organizations, half a million young Communists were being pressured to "Go East." In the public press, special inducements (tax exemptions, individual grants, free grain and flour, and bank credits of $2,500 for the building of houses and barns) were offered to peasants and workers to stake their future in the Eastern regions. Propaganda painted the effort as a "Great Adventure," the prospect as the opening of a "New Frontier." Trainloads of Russian hopefuls trekking eastward this year began what promised to be one of the great population migrations of recent times.

Everything Enormous. The country to which they were bound was Siberia. An area nearly twice the size of the U.S., stretching across the top of the globe from Europe to Alaska, bound by polar wastes in the north and the world's largest mountain ranges in the south, Siberia has potential mineral, agricultural and electric-power resources beyond calculation. But its winters are the coldest on earth. In the past, both Czarist and Soviet regimes have had to force people to live and work there. Tens of millions of hapless human slaves, cutting timber, tilling the bleak steppe, or digging through the permafrost (in some places 75 ft. deep) to get at the gold, iron, coal, copper, nickel, uranium, titanium, magnesium and bauxite have laid the foundations of a series of vast industrial enterprises. To develop this industry, the Soviet Union now needs the skills and crafts of mil lions of willing, i.e., voluntary, workers, and agricultural producers to feed them.

A mountain of iron in the southern Urals was the core of the first Soviet in dustrial complex. Last year the Urals and western Siberia alone produced more pig iron than Great Britain. The magnetic mountain at Magnitogorsk has been swallowed in the furnaces, and ore now comes from mines far away. A thousand miles deeper into Siberia is the Kuznetsk basin, where it is planned to produce 80 million tons of coal a year by 1960. Around Kuznetsk, in fast-growing industrial cities --Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, Krasnoyarsk, and at Karaganda some way to the southwest--are new steel mills, blast furnaces and aluminum plants, with auxiliary industries proliferating.

In keeping with Soviet mentality, the concepts tend to exceed the norm, and the phrase "gigantic work" figures constantly in the propaganda. Three great river systems, each larger than the Mississippi River itself, drain Siberia, but their estuaries, emptying into the polar sea, are still frozen when their tributaries are thawing, thus causing a backing up of waters which turns areas larger than Texas into impenetrable swamp. One of the great Siberian concepts is to reverse the direction of these rivers and cause them to flow south into the Aral and Caspian Seas. Another ambitious project, only partly successful, was the effort last year to plant an area of "Virgin Land" the size of the two Dakotas with corn and wheat to feed the new population.

Third Base. But one gigantic project about which the Soviet people hear little is the secret industrial activity in what Khrushchev calls "our third powerful base." This is a huge region 1,000 miles deeper into Siberia than the Kuznetsk basin, where a score of towns has sprung up in the past ten years. In the area of Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, all kinds of factories, many of them finishing and precision industries, are reportedly being established. But the clue to what actually goes on in this area is provided by the number of powerful hydroelectric stations being built. One hydroelectric plant on the Angara River, which empties into Lake Baikal, by 1960 will produce 8 billion more kilowatts per year than the Grand Coulee, the U.S.'s biggest power complex. Electric power is a basic ingredient of atomic production, and if the Soviet Union has atomic industries comparable in size with the AEC plants at Oak Ridge, Hanford and Savannah, Russian specialists believe that they are probably hidden in the wild, rugged country hereabouts.

It is to this far Irkutsk-Baikal region that most of the new immigrants from the West are bound. But beyond Lake Baikal coal mines are operating full force, and on the shores of the Pacific oil is being won. Sovietskaya Gavan is being built into a port to rival Vladivostok. Where salmon fishing and gold mining were once the only activities, yet one more industrial complex is being created. But production is less important here than people. In the great empty spaces along the borders of Siberia and Red China, a new, active population will function as a protective ring, as well as source of manpower, for the secret industries of Irkutsk-Baikal. Said Nikita Khrushchev at the recent 20th Party Congress: "In the next ten years we must convert Siberia into the biggest base of the Soviet Union."

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