The Vast New El Dorado in the Arctic

Siberia. The Russian name originally meant sleeping land, and so it has been since the beginning of history. For millenniums, men came and went in this vast expanse and scarcely left a mark. Ancient hunters in animal skins tracked the mammoth through the taiga--the deep silent forests of pines and birches. Nomadic tribesmen pushed up from the south, grazing their cattle and roaming on. Then the thunder of horses reverberated across the steppes, bearing the predatory banners of Genghis Khan. Chinese prospectors ranged northward to comb the wilderness for ginseng roots, the source of miraculous cures. The land echoed with the sad clanking of the chains that fettered the czars' prisoners, and then with the sighs of all those thousands who continued to be banished, body and soul, after the Bolshevik Revolution. "How many mysteries does the taiga hide in its enormity!" wrote Anton Chekhov. Siberia--land of ice and tears.

Engineer Roman Kuzovatkin turns a tap on a loop of steel pipe that juts from a snowbank near Samotlor. A spurt of fine black oil sprays the surrounding drifts. Moments later, a helicopter whips up a snowstorm as it takes off to ferry equipment to construction crews that are dynamiting the frozen earth to lay new pipelines. Farther to the north in the Nadym gas fields hard by the Arctic Circle, the long nights are thunderously lit by giant flares of blazing gas. It will soon light Western Europe and may one day heat New York. Two thousand miles to the southeast, gigantic cranes rear against the brilliant wilderness sky as they erect the skeleton of a new dam, half a mile long and 300 ft. high, across the frozen Angara River. Up in Yakutia, where temperatures dip to -90DEG F., reindeer-driven sleds bring supplies to geological-survey teams charting the wasteland for coal, iron and gas.

This is the new Siberia, an eastern El Dorado whose riches promise to make the Soviet Union of the 21st century the wealthiest nation on earth. Since the first oil well gushed forth in Tyumen province in 1960, Siberia has been found to contain the largest gas and oil reserves of any country in the world. Almost every day brings new discoveries. Geological maps are outdated as soon as they are printed. Scientists now believe that the entire region, equivalent in size to all of North America, is like a giant raft floating on a sea of gas and oil.

Siberia also has the world's largest deposits of iron ore and coal, virgin forests as large as all of Europe, half the world's gold production and diamond deposits matching those of South Africa. Half a dozen great rivers, all flowing north into the Arctic Ocean, may one day provide hydroelectric power across the Bering Strait for Canada and the U.S. It is not so wild a dream. Already the Russians have built the world's largest dams on the Yenisei and Angara rivers at Krasnoyarsk and Bratsk, and a third one is going up at Ust-Ilimsk (see map page 39). The riches of Siberia may well figure largely in China's border dispute with the Soviet Union. Other governments, including the U.S. and Japan, are also eying Siberia's resources for commercial development.

The promise of Siberia is still largely promise, however. The vast land is far from tamed. Although sleek new Yak 40 minijets now dart from city to city and the Trans-Siberian Railroad provides a 6,000-mile spinal column from Moscow to the Pacific, riverboats and horse-drawn sleds still provide the lifelines from one wooden village to the next. In many places bears are more plentiful than people, and hunters frequently have to eject them from the food-stocked little huts that are established as survival stations.

To exploit the newly discovered treasures of Siberia, the Soviets have undertaken what may be the greatest construction effort in history. A quarter of all Soviet development capital is now going into building pipelines, highways, railroads and entire cities all across Siberia. The scheduled cost of Siberian development in the present five-year plan (1971-75) is $100 billion, and economists say that the figure will increase in the next plan. Soviet authorities used to bar foreigners from the area for security reasons, but the costs of development are so staggering that Moscow is now actively courting foreign investment and technological know-how. It is negotiating with Japan for help in financing a $3 billion, 4,380-mile pipeline from the Tyumen oilfields to the Pacific port of Nakhodka; and it is trying hard to get long-term U.S. credits.

"Siberia's prospects and potential are of continental scale," cabled TIME's Moscow Bureau Chief John Shaw after a 5,000-mile swing through the region. "It is as though North America were being rediscovered. The delays and errors of Soviet planners have been considerable, but so have many of their achievements. In the face of fierce winters and broiling summers, when the tundra thaws just enough to become a mosquito-ridden swamp, Siberia has been converted into a force to be reckoned with in the world economy."

Some key projects:

TYUMEN, a province in western Siberia where the first rich find of gas and oil was discovered, lies at the southern edge of a vast field stretching 1,000 miles down the Ob River. Its oil production, which has doubled every year since 1965, is expected to hit 130 million tons by 1975, comparable to half of Saudi Arabia's output. A spur from the Trans-Siberian Railroad has been completed between the provincial capital of Tyumen and Tobolsk--both sleepy towns become boom cities--and is being extended 300 miles northward to Surgut.

SAMOTLOR, beneath the 100-sq.-mi. Lake Samotlor, is believed to be the world's richest single oil deposit, comparable in potential to the entire Alaskan North Slope. When fully developed, it will have more than 3,000 producing wells. Despite cold so extreme that steel becomes brittle and brake fluids freeze, Soviet drilling and construction crews are expanding production at a rate previously achieved only in Libya.

NADYM, a gas field discovered four years ago, contains 6 trillion cubic meters of gas, equivalent to three-quarters of U.S. reserves. A river port, rail spur and 600-mile gas line have been carved out of the desolate tundra, and by 1978 gas will be sent to West Europe. Three American companies are considering building a $7 billion pipeline 2,000 miles to Murmansk for shipment of liquefied gas to the U.S. East Coast.

THE ANGARA VALLEY, north of the old caravan-crossroads city of Irkutsk, is being opened up through dams on the Angara and Yenisei rivers. Nearby will be smelters, wood industries and chemical factories. The Russians' pride is the $1 billion Bratsk Dam, which was completed in 1964 after ten years of hardship and which contains as much masonry as the Great Pyramid of Cheops. "That was our October," says one veteran, using the image of the Russian Revolution to describe the days when construction workers lived in tents at temperatures of 60DEG below zero. Today the effort is being duplicated at Ust-Ilimsk, where 10,000 men work day and night, seven days a week, to throw up another dam.

YAKUTSK, the capital of the republic of Yakutia in northeastern Siberia, lies at the heart of a huge gas deposit estimated by the Russians to measure 460 trillion cu. ft., or one-quarter more than all known deposits in the Middle East. Moscow announced last week that production had begun at the nearby field of Middle Vilyui, but it will not be easy to get the gas out. Yakutsk's Permafrost Institute is experimenting with new techniques to pipe gas and oil through the perennially frozen earth.

Extracting the wealth of Siberia is a matter not just of money and machinery, of course, but also of people, and the cruelty of life in the Arctic area is enough to deter many. Siberia boosters used to claim that the population would climb from its present 25 million to about 60 million by the year 2000; the current rate of growth is unlikely to produce more than about half that number. All Siberian workers, from a waitress in Yakutsk to a drilling engineer at Nadym, get "northern bonuses" that double and triple Moscow wage rates, but the labor turnover is nonetheless high. Every year 17,000 new workers arrive in the Irkutsk region, and 10,000 others leave. Some of these are students who are sent out on compulsory assignments of two or three years to repay the state for their higher education.

Still, a hard core of confirmed Sibiryaki is slowly growing. They are a new breed: hardy, adventurous, optimistic, apparently enjoying the contest between man and nature. Most are young: the average age in Bratsk is 30, and the city has the highest birth rate in the Soviet Union.

The new Siberians love the space and clean air, the pleasures of camping in the short but vivid summer, the beauty of the woods in spring and fall. "One freezing night in Irkutsk," reports Correspondent Shaw, "I went with a group of local poets to a poetry reading at an engineering plant. Three hundred young workers, mostly pretty girls, turned up to listen to poetry. When the poets had finished, they insisted that I contribute whatever I could remember. Being cheered for verses remembered from school days by an audience of Siberian factory hands is a memory to cherish."

Anatoly Dmitrievich Shakshin is typical. At 43, he is boss of Drilling Crew No. 50 at the Samotlor oilfield. With overtime and bonuses, he earns about $1,000 a month. He drives to the fields in a jeep he bought at a special price of $1,600. He pays $24 a month for his apartment, which has only three small rooms; but he does not need much space. His wife works as a bookkeeper, his 20-year-old son is in military school, and his five-year-old son is in kindergarten. The Shakshins take six weeks off in the summer, and he goes duck shooting in the fall. What does he do with his money? He says that he is saving for retirement (55 for men, 50 for women), when he hopes to buy an apartment on the Black Sea.

In the meantime, a Siberian passes his time as best he can. Moscow television comes in by satellite. Novosibirsk, the "Chicago of Siberia," with a population of 1,200,000, has a superb opera house, a ballet troupe and a new heated swimming pool. In Bratsk, now a bustling metropolis of 200,000, the gastronom sells Algerian red wine, and visiting dance bands play a mixture of rousing Soviet songs and early Elvis at the new six-story Hotel Taiga.

There are less heartening sides to Siberia. Fresh fruits and vegetables disappear with the first frost. Rents are low, but food and clothes are expensive. In Irkutsk a chicken can cost $5, an ordinary woman's coat $100. The interminable winters, when the sun shines only four hours a day, produce deep depression in some people--"Arctic hysteria," they used to call it. As a result, Siberians are among the most fanatical flower lovers; they think little of paying $2 for a single lily or carnation.

All over Siberia, there is an urgent need for new housing, and the quality of plans varies widely. Akademgorodok, the "science city" built in 1964 among the pines and birch groves south of Novosibirsk, is one of the finest examples of urban planning anywhere. It boasts lovely frame houses and pastel apartment buildings, interspersed with markets and shops, theaters and cafes, all carefully laid out and integrated with the natural environment. At Bratsk, by contrast, concrete-block housing was built like a series of barracks over 40 miles of forests. "We have the world's biggest green belt," one resident wryly observes.

Beyond the problems of city planning, the rapid exploitation of Siberia's resources poses other questions. What will happen to the native peoples who for centuries have lived in peace with the wilderness? So far the Evenks, Nentsy, Yakuts and a dozen or so other nomadic tribes who are cousins of America's Indians and Eskimos have been led into literacy and allowed to follow traditional occupations like reindeer herding and fur trapping. The Buddhist Buryats, primarily shepherds and cattle raisers of Mongol origin, are allowed to practice their religion. But as with all Siberians, their life is changing, and industrialization may jeopardize their cultural identity.

And what does the future hold for the world's last great wilderness? Will it eventually be destroyed by industrialization? Already the wolf and the Siberian tiger are vanishing, and poaching is endangering the sable. In 1968 Soviet naturalists protested that toxic wastes from a cellulose factory were threatening the more than 1,000 unique species of plant and fish life in Lake Baikal, the purest and deepest fresh-water lake in the world. After much delay, filters were finally installed, though Moscow's Literary Gazette says that it is still questionable whether Lake Baikal can retain its complex ecology.

Human Fog. There are plans afoot to divert water from the Ob River 2,000 miles to drought-afflicted Kazakhstan. The scheme has obvious value for Soviet agriculture, but nobody seems to have weighed the environmental risks of such meddling. The extreme cold contributes to air pollution as well. Since moisture hangs in the air, "human fog" shrouds cities like Tyumen and Yakutsk in winter, trapping vehicle exhausts and wastes from power stations. Siberia's future, obviously, is far from settled.

In Tyumen they like to tell of a ten-year-old boy from the Yamal ("Edge of the World") Peninsula, beyond the Arctic Circle, who was given a prize trip to Moscow. When he returned, he was interviewed on the radio and asked what he thought of the historic Kremlin. "Sibir luchshe [Siberia is better]," the boy replied. For all Siberia's hazards and hardships, there are enough Russians who feel the same way to bring new life to the land that Dostoevsky once called "the house of the dead."

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