No More Learning

Yet no sooner was the Third Five-Year Plan well
under way than the shadows of war began to gather most
menacingly. The Anglo-French surrender to Hitler at
Munich took place in the fall of 1938. The Second World
War broke out a year later. And in June, 1940, France
yielded to the Nazi blitzkrieg. These tragic happenings
naturally had a heavy impact on the Soviet Union. From
the time of Munich on, the Soviet Government felt
impelled to put more and more into the defense budget
and the manufacture of armaments. When fascist ag-
gression finally engulfed the Soviet Republic in June of
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
1941, much of the Third Five-Year Plan, especially that
part of it concerned with higher living standards, was
discarded so that the energies of the nation could be con-
centrated on war production and defense.
Once more the people had to forego the rewards of
their titanic labors, postponing their richly deserved
leisure and enjoyments to a future when peace would
reign again. The hurricane that had swept Europe de-
scended upon the Russians with unparalleled fury. And
the additional tragedy for the Soviet Union was that it
was truly in sight of the promised land when Hitler's
murderous legions marched into the depths of the coun-
try carrying death, arson and destruction.
Ralph Parker, New York Times correspondent in
Moscow during the war years, wrote: "Try hard as they
can, it is well-nigh impossible for people in lands that
have not been fought over and occupied to grasp the scale
of the hardships borne by the individual Russian during
the war. Conditions had been such in the pre-war years
that very few had been able to accumulate more than the
most modest possessions, and when victory came, every-
thing had been consumed. The furniture had been used
to feed the little stoves. Schoolchildren wrote their exer-
cises in copy-books made of old newspapers. In winter,
the office-workers sat in their overcoats. Large cities like
Smolensk and Kiev were without electric light or tap
water. Over areas the size of France the factories stood
idle or in ruins. There were large farms where only
women worked. Peasants stood in markets from dawn
to dusk with three or four eggs to sell. The trains ran
ten miles an hour. With eyes smudged with fatigue,
shabby, speechless, people dragged themselves slowly to
work. "10 Mr. Parker was echoing what Winston Chur-
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? ECOHOMIC AHD CULTURAL PROGRESS
chill had said earlier: "The Russians, under their warrior
chief, Stalin, sustained losses which no other country or
government has ever borne in so short a time and lived. "11
From the moment of the Nazi invasion total planning
for total war became the order of the day. The special-
ists of the State Planning Committee one and all had
to become experts on how to mobilize the full economic
resources of the U. S. S. R. Throughout the conflict this
Committee worked closely with the special State Defense
Committee, a war cabinet of eight high-ranking Soviet
leaders, with Premier Stalin as Chairman, which took over
the full powers of government from June, 1941, to Sep-
tember, 1945. The people themselves, in locality after
locality, having learned over the years the meaning and
methods of planning, adapted their cooperative technique
to the war emergency and coordinated all efforts for
victory over the invader.
Social-economic planning went right on operating
throughout the four years of terrible warfare and, as I
have already recounted, played an indispensable part in
the ultimate defeat of Hitler. Prior to the war, that
planning had built up the economic and armed strength
of the U. S. S. R. to the point where the country could
withstand the greatest military assault ever unleashed
upon this planet. The Five-Year Plans had not only
created immense industrial facilities behind the barrier
of the Ural Mountains, but also a huge and reliable agri-
cultural reserve for the production of foodstuffs in this
same Siberian hinterland. Had it not been for this re-
serve, the nation might well have collapsed from lack
of food after the Germans had occupied the Ukraine,
traditional granary for all Russia.
As soon as, in 1943, the Red Army started to recapture
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
large sections of the Ukraine and western Russia, the
Soviet planners were on the spot to help reconstruct the
devastated regions. Declared the head of the Technical
Department of the Coal Ministry in 1943: "The earth
has not yet cooled off after the hot fighting, when the
coal experts who follow in the wake of the Red Army are
already on the job, organizing restoration of the mines. "12
The miners were back working in the pits one week after
the liberation of the vital Donbas area in the Ukraine;
and within another week newly dug coal from these
mines was reaching Moscow. During the same year the
Government launched in the liberated regions a general
program of rebuilding and restoration.
By the end of December, 1944, when it seemed that
Hitler's downfall was not far off, some industries began
to make initial preparations for peacetime production.
Almost immediately after the Nazi surrender extensive
demobilization started in the Soviet Union. Less than
a week after Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allies
on August 14, 1945, the Soviet Government and the
Communist Party called upon the State Planning Com-
mittee to make ready tentative schedules for a Fourth
Five-Year Plan. The Committee proceeded to draw up
the Plan, which was later ratified, with some revisions,
by the Supreme Soviet. It went into effect on January 1,
1946, to run through 1950.
4. Post-War Economic Gains
It was clear that the main goals of the Fourth Five-
Year Plan would have to be economic reconstruction and
reconversion. The war against Germany and Japan had
cost the Soviet Union approximately 485 billion dollars,
including total property damages of about 128 billion
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? ECOHOMIC AND CULTURAL PROGRESS
from the Nazi invasion and occupation. The Nazis de-
molished or put out of commission more than one-third
of the industrial plant existing in 1941; they destroyed
1,710 towns, 70,000 villages and hamlets, 35,000 factories
and 40,000 hospitals; and they made 25,000,000 persons
homeless.
The vast tasks of reconversion were apparent in the
fact that toward the conclusion of the war the Soviets
were manufacturing annually 40,000 airplanes, 30,000
tanks, 120,000 pieces of artillery, 450,000 machine-guns
and 5,000,000 rifles and tommy-guns. The Plan aimed
to bring back over-all production to the pre-war level of
1940 by the end of 1948; and by the end of 1950 to
achieve complete restoration in the devastated areas and
increase total production 48 percent beyond 1940. It
stressed the development of transportation by railway
and water, further electrification and the expansion of
light industries producing consumer goods such as tex-
tiles, leather and canned foodstuffs.
In December, 1947, rationing, which had been a
necessary hold-over from the war years, was totally abol-
ished; and the ruble, which had depreciated in worth
because of the war inflation, was drastically revalued.
During 1948 production in general fulfilled the Fourth
Five-Year Plan's program of reaching the pre-war level.
In 1949 most industries, as well as agriculture, surged
considerably ahead of the 1940 figures. The 1949 report
of the Central Statistical Administration included the
significant statement: "In 1949, as in preceding years,
there was no unemployment in the country. " Unfortu-
nately, due to fear of aggression and the Government's
insistence on secrecy, the Soviet authorities have con-
tinued the policy instituted in 1940 of releasing no totals
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
for actual output and giving out only percentages of
achievement and increase.
On March 1, 1950, as a result of the economic ad-
vances made in 1949, the Government effected a sweep-
ing reduction in prices on 234 different kinds of food
and consumption goods. This amounted to an average
lowering in price levels of at least 20 percent and of
course a corresponding rise in the purchasing power of
the ruble. It was the fourth general price reduction
which had taken place under the Fourth Five-Year Plan.
At the same time the Soviet Cabinet put the ruble on the
gold standard and increased its official value, in terms
of the dollar, from nineteen to twenty-five cents. This
movement strengthened the ruble both internally and as
a medium of international monetary exchange.
The Fourth Five-Year Plan as a whole was fulfilled in
four years and three months; and in its last year -- 1950
-- the total volume of Soviet industry rose 73 percent
above the level of 1940, as compared with the 48 percent
increase envisaged by the Plan. The production sched-
ules of the Plan were all exceeded in iron, steel, coal,
peat, oil, electric power, machine-building and tractors.
All the hydroelectric power stations destroyed during the
Nazi invasion were restored and many new ones built.
However, the Five-Year Plan goals were not reached for
certain types of machine equipment, for the production
of bricks and tiles, for the hauling of timber and for the
general reduction of construction costs. But in all these
categories the figures were far above those of 1940.
Soviet economists considered the repair of destroyed
railways as the most decisive task of the Fourth Five-Year
Plan. By the end of 1950 the full Plan for the restoration
and building of railroads, bridges and stations had been
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? ECOHOMIC AHD CULTURAL PROGRESS
met. Average daily loadings on the railways for 1950
amounted to 121 percent of 1940 and 103 percent of the
Plan figure. Production of locomotives rose to 4,000 per
year. The carriage of cargoes by inland water transport
increased to 26 percent above 1940, but did not fulfil
the level set by the Plan.
One of the most significant features of the Fourth
Five-Year Plan was the rapid advance in technology
throughout industry. In steel manufacturing, the use of
oxygen was generally introduced, resulting in much faster
smelting and therefore in greater productive capacities
for furnaces. In the coal industry, cutting, breaking and
hauling the coal underground, and loading it into freight
cars at the surface were largely mechanized, thus saving
much labor and easing the lot of the miner. Much atten-
tion is now being given to developing remote control
and automatic operation of mining equipment so as to
reduce to a minimum the need of underground work by
human beings. Horrifying mine explosions such as still
take place in Britain and America -- witness the one
which killed 119 miners in Illinois in December, 1951 --
have become unknown in the Soviet Union, due to
modern ventilation systems and other technical devices.
During the Fourth Five-Year Plan, in the oil industry,
the production of high-octane aviation fuel and lubricants
was expanded, and quality improved. This period also
continued a major trend, very important for Soviet de-
fense, in the geographical distribution of oil extraction.
Whereas in 1940 only 12 percent of Soviet oil came from
areas outside the Caucasus and Transcaucasus, now 44
percent is taken from territories far away from the fron-
tier, such as the Ural Mountains region and Soviet Cen-
tral Asia.
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
In the manufacture of machine tools, so vital to mod-
ern industry, the Soviet Union has come closest of all to
the United States in quantity and quality. By 1950 there
were more than 1,300,000 machine tools in the U. S. S. R. ,
and production, at over 100,000 per year, was 2. 3 times
as much as 1940. The rapid expansion of the machine-
building industry ensures regular re-equipment of the
entire economy, a steady increase in labor productivity
and continuous technical progress. A striking new devel-
opment was the establishment of automatically operated
lines of machinery in twenty-six factories. The only per-
sons on duty in these installations are supervisory engi-
neers and maintenance mechanics.
The Fourth Five-Year Plan brought about sensational
strides in heavy construction machinery. Today a single
plant in the Urals turns out six complete blast furnaces
a year, each one being, in height and bulk, the equivalent
of a high office building. The bulldozer, the earth-mover
and the walking-excavator -- a power shovel too heavy
for caterpillar tracks -- have now become standard equip-
ment on construction projects. In the building of the
Volga-Don Canal engineers used a dragline excavator
doing the labor of 7,000 pick-and-shovel men and requir-
ing two freight trains each a mile long to move its dis-
assembled parts. According to Soviet engineers, the new
giant dredge-digger, an electric-powered model called
"Stalingrad II," performs the work of more than 300,000
laborers. It can move and transport close to 340,000
cubic yards of earth in a twenty-hour day.
The unceasing development of machine processes has
wrought a revolution On field and farm by leading to the
almost complete industrialization of agriculture. In 1950
more than 95 percent of the ploughing, sowing and har-
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? ECOHOMIC AHD CULTURAL PROGRESS
vesting of grain was done by mechanical traction. The
output of combines had increased 3. 6 times as compared
with 1940 and that of tractors 3. 8 times. And agriculture
in general had received 536,000 new tractors, in terms
of fifteen-horsepower units, as contrasted with 523,000
in use in 1940. Experiments with electrically operated
tractors were proving successful. It is to be stressed that
there is a whole federal Ministry concerned with agri-
cultural machine-building.
The expansion in agricultural machinery from 1946
through 1950 was so great that it became desirable to
merge a large proportion of the smaller collective farms
in order to permit the most effective use of the new equip-
ment. Three-quarters of the collectives amalgamated on
an average basis of three into one. One-quarter of the
previously existing farms were considered big enough
for maximum efficiency and underwent no change. The
result has been a reduction in the number of collective
farms from approximately 252,000 to approximately
123,000. The average collective now probably has about
2,500 acres of arable land worked by close to 200 families.
The Fourth Five-Year Plan also saw the rapid col-
lectivization of agriculture in the three Baltic Republics,
in Moldavia, in western Ukraine and in western Belo-
russia -- the areas reunited with the U. S. S. R. just before
the Nazi invasion. According to Mr. C. L. Sulzberger,
writing in The New York Times of July 26, 1949, special
inducements offered to Baltic farmers to join collectives
that year included: "A 50 percent reduction in income
taxes; loans to collective farmers; and a 10 percent re-
duction in charges for hiring of state tractors. " The
guarantee of these and other immediate benefits, as well
as intensive education as to the general superiority of
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
collective effort, resulted in some 95 percent of the
farmers in the Baltic States joining collective farms by
the end of 1950.
The post-war progress of agriculture quickly put an
end to the meagre food rations of the war period. By the
conclusion of the Fourth Five-Year Plan the total grain
yield was 13 percent above 1940. Butter production had
risen 57 percent, vegetable oil and other fats 10 percent,
meat 7 percent, sausage products 20 percent, tinned goods
48 percent, sugar 17 percent and confectionery products
23 percent. The fish catch increased 27 percent. Baby
foods went up 5. 7 times above the pre-war level and vita-
mins 10. 4 times.
Consumers' goods other than edibles kept pace with
the other advances in the economy. Output in textiles,
clothing, knitted goods and other branches of light
industry increased 17 percent over 1940. To quote the
official report issued jointly by the State Planning Com-
mittee and Central Statistical Administration: "Produc-
tion of the chief articles of light industry increased dur-
ing the five-year period as follows: cotton goods 2. 4 times,
woolen fabrics 2. 9 times, hosiery 5. 2 times, leather foot-
wear 3. 2 times, rubber footwear 7 times. However, the
Five-Year Plan assignment for production of cotton
goods and footwear was not fully met. The assortment
of fabrics, clothing, knitted goods and footwear was sub-
stantially improved and expanded. . . . In 1950 sales of
clocks and watches were 3. 3 times the pre-war year of
1940, radio sets 6 times, electric household appliances
1. 5 times, bicycles 2. 9 times, sewing machines almost
3 times and motorcycles 16 times. "18
I could go on citing innumerable statistics of this sort.
But I have mentioned enough to show that the Fourth
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? ECOHOMIC AHD CULTURAL PROGRESS
Five-Year Plan fulfilled all its main objectives and
demonstrated the ability of socialist planning to sur-
mount the post-war probems of reconstruction and go
far beyond. Nineteen fifty-one, the first year of the Fifth
Five-Year Plan*, 1951-1955, extended the advances and
pushed up total industrial production to twice the pre-
war figure. This puts the people within sight of the tran-
sition to a communist system, since Soviet economists
claim that a threefold industrial increase over 1940 will
lay the basis for communism. Under communism distri-
bution will be according to need and the country will,
it is predicted, be "literally saturated" with consumer
goods in unheard-of abundance. Soviet theoreticians are
now saying that if the present rate of economic growth
continues, the U. S. S. R. will be ready for communism
around 1960.
Of vital import to evolution towards communism is
likely to be the application of atomic energy to peaceful
purposes in the Soviet Union. On September 23, 1949,
President Truman announced that within recent weeks
an atomic explosion had occurred in the U. S. S. R. The
Russians then asserted that they had possessed the secret
of the atom bomb as early as 1947. In 1950 a leading
Soviet atomic specialist, Professor V. Golubtsov, wrote
in an article that Soviet science had discovered how to
directly transform atomic energy into both electrical
power and heat. In 1951 a top Soviet chemist, A. N.
Nesmeyanov, said that "Russian scientists now are using
atomic energy for developing the nation's industry and
agriculture. "14
While these claims have not yet been verified, I be-
* For the detailed directives and goals of the Fifth Five-Year Plan, which
aims at a 70 percent increase in industrial production and the turnover of
retail goods by the end of 1955, see The New York Times of August 23, 1952.
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
lieve it highly probable that atomic power is being har-
nessed in some measure to economic ends. As Mr. Har-
rison E. Salisbury, Moscow correspondent of The New
York Times, has pointed out, Soviet Russia "is free to
apply this new energy when and as needed without en-
countering the problem of competition with existing
forms of energy or of establishing new machinery for
governmental operation of the plants, which in time,
may become the industrial backbone of the nation. "15 In
other words, the Soviet socialist order, based as it is on
public ownership, can adjust rather easily to the peaceful
utilization of the potent atom.
Despite the major emphasis in all the Five-Year Plans
to date on capital construction and heavy industry, the
post-war upsurge in general living standards has been
notable. Although it is most difficult to compare accu-
rately the standard of living with that in other countries,
it is sound to state that the Soviet worker today eats as
well as the British, French, German or Italian worker.
A well-known English chocolate manufacturer, Paul
Cadbury, who visited the Soviet Union with a Quaker
group in the summer of 1951, declared in an address at
Swarthmore College: "The standard of living of the
ordinary people in Russia today is comparable, perhaps
not exactly the same, but in the same bracket as the
standard of living in England; they are well fed, well
clothed, satisfied and content with the country in which
they live. . . . I find that there is a good deal of ignorance
in America about conditions as they are in Russia. Several
people have asked me, 'Did you see anyone smile? ' Well,
it made me smile to be asked that question because quite
unlike the conditions in Germany before the war, or even
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? ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL PROGRESS
as I noticed them in Czechoslovakia on our way out to
Moscow, people in Russia seem happy. I think that the
reason is this: They measure everything by their own
past. "16
What the secretary of a British workers' delegation
to the Soviet Union in 1950 reported about the Russians
is of equal significance: "When you talk to them as we
did on our visit, and ask them about their living stand-
ards, they usually start right off by telling you that they
have abolished fear of being unemployed, fear of being
thrown on the scrap heap because of old age, fear of what
might happen if the breadwinner became ill, fear of not
being able to pay rent, fear of not being able to give the
children a good start in life. This complete absence of
anxiety about the future, this lack of worry about whether
there will be enough work, surely must be ranked among
the most priceless possessions. It must create a light-
heartedness and care-ffee spirit such as few of us, not even
the wealthy ones among us with their stocks and share
troubles, can imagine. It must release tremendous ener-
gies, mental and physical. "17
Typical of Soviet Russia's earth-shaking projects is
the Fifteen-Year Agricultural Plan, 1949-65. This ambi-
tious scheme, generally known as the Plan for Field Pro-
tecting Forest Belts, aims to alter the climate, prevent
drought and stabilize the harvests throughout an area in
southern Russia and Siberia that is half the size of the
United States and contains 75,000,000 people. In this
vast region west and south of the Ural Mountains the
hot, dry, relentless winds from the east have for centuries
swept over the open steppes of the Lower Volga Valley,
the Northern Caucasus and Ukraine, drying out or blow-
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATIOH
ing away the vital topsoil, burning up the crops and
depositing tons of stifling dust and sand upon the fertile
fields.
The destruction of forests by man or nature -- forests
that hold the soil, preserve moisture and temper the
winds -- has been the prime factor in this process and
has in addition led to perennial floods. In his notable
book, Our Plundered Planet, the American naturalist,
Mr. Fairfield Osborn, shows how again and again in
human history the reckless felling of forests has eventual-
ly brought to the richest lands erosion, flood, drought,
desert and desolation. And he cites as deplorable ex-
amples the Yellow River Valley in China, the Tigris-
Euphrates Valley in the Near East and the life-devouring
dust-bowls in the southwest of the United States.
Insofar as Russia has been subject to this same pro-
cess, the Soviets intend to arrest it by an unprecedented
program of man-created woodlands, whose spongy floors
will retain both snow and rain, thus preventing sudden
thaws and floods, and whose bulk will act as windbreaks.
Evaporation of water from the new forest areas and from a
far-flung new system of reservoirs will moisten the atmos-
phere and cause more frequent rainfall. The Soviet
Fifteen-Year Plan of transforming the face of the earth
envisages five main steps:
First, the planting, at intervals of 100 to 200 miles
across the immense expanse from the Ukraine to the
Urals, of eight huge forest zones each consisting of several
tree-belts; second, the planting of extensive tree-belts on
the collective farms themselves, to protect the fields and
to cover some 5 percent of the total farmlands concerned;
third, the planting of bushes to hold down the sands on
over 805,000 acres; fourth, the construction throughout
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? ECOHOMIC AHD CULTURAL PROGRESS
the area now subject to drought of more than 44,000
new ponds and reservoirs; and fifth, systematization of
improved methods in crop rotation, including the intro-
duction of special grasses to bind and restore the soil.
A number of government agencies and 80,000 col-
lective farms, possessing a total of 300,000,000 acres,
are cooperating to put through these various measures.
The entire project is under the direction of the newly
created Chief Administration of Protective Afforesta-
tion, which is directly responsible to the Soviet Cabinet.
By the end of 1951, 5,790,000 acres of land had been
planted to trees and the planting completed in two of
the eight forest zones: the 100-mile wall from Stalingrad
north to Kamyshin along the west bank of the Volga
River, and the winding 300-mile belt on both sides of
the Northern Donets from Belgorod to the river's junc-
tion with the Don. During the same period approxi-
mately 13,500 ponds and reservoirs had been constructed.
Rivaling in scope the great Agricultural Plan are six
new projects recently undertaken by the Soviets in a
combined program of dams, hydroelectric power, irriga-
tion and inland waterways that surpasses in magnitude
anything of the sort ever attempted by man. The first
of these huge enterprises is the 62-mile Volga-Don Ship
Canal, which was opened in 1952. Included in this
project is a dam at Tsimlyanskaya twice as long as
America's longest at Fort Peck on the Missouri, and 350
miles of trunk irrigation canals which will carry much-
needed water to 6,790,000 acres.
The economic importance of the Volga-Don Canal
is obvious. With the Moscow-Volga Canal and other
waterways to the north, it will provide through naviga-
tion from the Black Sea to the Baltic and White Seas;
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
and will make the capital of the Soviet Union directly
accessible to oceangoing vessels from the Mediterranean.
It will link, through cheap water transport, the Moscow
and Ural industrial areas, the Don-Volga grain belts and
the Baku oil fields with the Ukraine's coal, iron, steel
and other resources; and with the outside world via the
Black Sea.
Second and third in the Soviet prospectus I have been
outlining here are new giant dams across the Volga at
Kuibyshev, temporary capital of the Soviet Union during
the recent war, and at Stalingrad, embattled city where
the tide finally turned against the Nazis. Soviet experts
calculate that each dam will produce a minimum of
2,000,000 kilowatts of electric power per year, which is
as much as the output of America's greatest hydroelectric
development -- Grand Coulee on the Columbia River.
It is expected that the two new Volga dams will go into
operation by 1956 and that together they will irrigate
some 35,000,000 acres of potentially rich agricultural
lands.
Fourth in this impressive Soviet program are a second
dam on the Dnieper River at Kakhovka, about 150 miles
below the old dam at Zaporozhe which Americans helped
to erect, and a companion structure on a smaller river
to the east. These two dams, to be finished in 1957, will
make possible the irrigation of large tracts along the
Black Sea coast suitable for cotton and other crops. A
unique feature of this project is that the main irrigation
canal, 350 miles long, will be carried across the western
arm of the Sea of Azov in order to irrigate the Crimean
Peninsula.
Fifth in this brief look at the Soviet future is the
Great Turkmenian Canal in Central Asia to be built
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? ECOHOMIC AHD CULTURAL PROGRESS
680 miles across the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic
and its immense Desert of Kara-Kum (Black Sands).
The purpose of the combined ship and irrigation canal
is both to restore fertility to thousands of square miles of
sun-scorched, arid wasteland and also to connect Soviet
Central Asia by water traffic with the western part of the
U. S. S. R. and, through the Volga-Don development, with
foreign countries. The project will link together the
Amu-Darya River, now emptying into the land-locked
Aral Sea, and the Caspian Sea. It will draw its water
from the Amu-Darya and, for about two-thirds of its
length, will flow along the ancient bed of this river, which
centuries ago wound across the present desert region
into the Caspian just south of Krasnovodsk.
This canal, together with its three big hydroelectric
stations, is scheduled for completion in 1957; and will
irrigate, through 750 miles of permanent branch canals,
3,250,000 acres for cotton growing. In addition it will
provide supplementary water to 17,500,000 acres of cattle
range. The plans also call for the planting of 1,250,000
acres of trees along the canal and its main branches, and
around the borders of the newly irrigated lands in order
to confine the desert sands and to serve as shelter belts.
Six hundred and twenty miles of pipe lines connected
with the canal will bring fresh water to such cities as
Krasnovodsk, which now obtains its water by tankers or
by distillation from the salty Caspian.
One of the striking things about these remarkable
Soviet developments is the speed with which they are
being accomplished. The Volga-Don Canal, its huge
dam, and power installations were built in two years.
The two new Volga dams and installations are timed to
go into operation within five years from the start of work;
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? SOVIET CIVILIZATION
the two new Dnieper dams and the Grand Turkmenian
Canal within six years. Of course public ownership of
land and power in the Soviet Union is an indispensable
factor in the rapid fulfilment of these great projects.
Sixth and most spectacular is the plan worked out
by a Soviet engineer, Mitrofan Davydov. His novel idea
is to reverse the courses of the Ob and Yenisei -- great
rivers comparable to the Mississippi in length and volume
-- now flowing north through Siberia to the Arctic Ocean,
in order to drain the useless, unending Siberian swamp-
lands, to irrigate an enormous desert region in Central
Asia and to raise the level of the falling Caspian Sea.
Since the Siberian territories involved are very flat, it
is possible to block the northward course of the two
rivers by building dams only a little more than 250 feet
high.
The Ob dam alone will create the world's biggest
reservoir, with a surface area of nearly 100,000 square
miles, larger than all of America's Great Lakes put to-
gether. From this reservoir, to be called the Lower Ob
Sea, a new river will run 2,500 miles southwest, through
man-made canals, existing bodies of water and the chan-
nels of ancient rivers. It will pass through the Aral Sea,
turning its water from salt into fresh, and then flow into
the Amu-Darya River and the Great Turkmenian Canal
for its final journey to the Caspian.
The Yenisei River will later be brought into the
system by the cutting of a 56-mile-long canal connecting
it with the Lower Ob Sea. Sufficient water will then be-
come available to supply regular irrigation for approxi-
mately 61,700,000 acres of land and to water at least
74,000,000 acres more of meadow and pasture. The chief
beneficiary of these developments will be the Kazakh Re-
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? ECONOMIC AHD CULTURAL PROGRESS
public, the agricultural produce of which will increase, it
is estimated, five- to seven-fold. The new Soviet-con-
structed river will be wide enough and deep enough for
navigation; and the entire project, after the Yenisei is in-
cluded, will provide the Soviet Union with 5,000 addi-
tional miles of arterial waterways. Numerous hydroelec-
tric plants will be built throughout the river-canal net-
work.
Let me quote Mr. Davydov himself on the general
effects of his scheme: "The artificially created Lower
Ob Sea and the appearance of billions of cubic meters
of water in what have from time immemorial been arid
and desert regions will have a beneficent influence on the
climate of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, as well as of
western Siberia. The climate of Central Asia will be
of a less pronounced continental character, and the sharp
annual and diurnal extremes of temperature character-
istic of this region will become a thing of the past. Over
a large part of Siberia the atmosphere will become more
humid, and the winters milder. It will be possible to
carry agriculture into latitudes where it is now precluded
owing to the severe climate. "18
Engineers and scientists have thoroughly discussed
and debated the Davydov plan. Specialized groups show-
ing a particular interest in it have been the Moscow
Institute of Electrical Engineering, the U. S. S. R. Academy
of Sciences' Institute for the Study of Productive Forces,
the Power Research Institute of the Academy of Sciences,
the Ail-Union Forestry Society, the Water Conservation
Board of the U. S. S. R. Ministry of Agriculture, the Scien-
tific Council of the Ministry of Fisheries and the Science
and Technology Council of the Ministry of Electric
Power Stations. In 1951 the Government officially ap-
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