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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 60° 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."