Boom on the Steppes

To all but a very few of the U. S. S. R.'s 170,000,000 inhabitants the Battle of Britain last week was a faraway thing--as faraway, but as interesting, as an unusual conjunction of planets. On the third and fifth pages of their Pravda or Izvestia, Muscovites who cared could read of the battle's progress, in dry little paragraphs like items of scientific rather than popular interest. Bigger news which those papers evidently expected to stir the proletariat were developments in the East, especially in the five central Asiatic republics. In this remote corner of Asia, where the U. S. S. R. borders on Afghanistan, on India and on China, the Soviet Government has zealously invested men & money, on the theory that Russia's Asiatic borderlands can properly be defended only if they are properly developed.

By last week--even making allowance for Stalinist hyperbole--this vast region, as big as European Russia, was experiencing an industrial and agricultural boom. It was reported that:

> In the oil fields of Emba in the Kazak Republic, which in 1916 were supposed to be exhausted, new deposits have been tapped, production is growing rapidly and a long pipe line from the centre of the fields to the Caspian is nearing completion. In Turkestan still richer fields are being exploited.

> Huge coal deposits at Karaganda in Kazak, only recently prospected, are now yielding 5,500,000 tons a year, and the once Godforsaken hamlet of Karaganda has become a modern city. So has Kounrad, where the mining of extensive copper deposits around Lake Balkhash has begun. Sulfur plants have sprung up in the hills of Darvaz in Turkestan.

> Railroads are beginning to thread their way through these new industrial centres. Hydroelectric plants are being completed.

> New schools, hospitals and technical institutions have been built in the larger centres.

> In the agricultural districts irrigation projects have transformed semi-deserts into fertile land. The reddish soil of some of the regions of central Asia is almost fantastically fertile. Since the days of Tamerlane peoples have fought wars for water, have dug aryks (irrigation canals). In periods of peace when the primitive irrigation systems functioned well, the country bathed in prosperity. In wars the aryks were destroyed and the desert advanced again. Soviet irrigation systems for cotton land were completed under the first and second Five-Year Plans, but only in 1939 and 1940 did crop yields become impressive.

In the Uzbek Republic (which produces more than half the U. S. S. R.'s cotton) hundreds of thousands of Uzbek and Tajik farmers last year produced a "miracle": in a little more than a month they dug a canal, 170 miles long, 25 yards wide and 15 to 30 feet deep, from the Narin River to the great cotton-growing region south of the ancient city of Kokand. This year the Great Fergana Canal was lengthened to 217 miles, now irrigates 838 square miles, improves the irrigation of 695.

From 1936 to 1938 (last year for which figures are available) the U. S. S. R. was the world's third largest producer of cotton. Russia's growing industry needs more & more cotton, and in 1938 used the entire harvest of 3,000,000 tons (12,000,000 bales). Last week the Soviet press exulted that Russia would soon export cotton to the already cotton-glutted world.

No foreign correspondent has yet checked up on this rosy picture. But that it is not based wholly on self-delusion is shown by the fact that while European Russia gained 12% in population from 1926 to 1939, the Turkomen Republic grew 25%, Uzbek 37%, Tajik 43%. Only a real boom can produce such population increases, even in nations where labor moves from place to place at the orders of a dictator.

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