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. . . One U. S. engineer and 13,000 Russians mining 10,000 tons of asbestos rock daily in Azbest. . . . "The largest construction camp in the world" going full blast at Magnetogorsk on the Capitalist "piece work" system, building what is to be "the greatest steel centre on Earth. ..." A dam three quarters of a mile long across the Ural River completed in four months. . . .
. . . Engineers (who have excavated 600,000 cubic yards of dirt and poured 12,000 cubic metres of concrete at Cheliabinsk since last July) waiting angrily for steel to erect the world's largest tractor factory. . . . Three hundred and eighty U. S. machinists making tractors in Stalingrad at a wage of $10 daily with cognac, wine and beer abundant. . . .
. . . Gigant, the largest farm on earth, so badly run that Correspondent Knickerbocker estimates a loss in "real dollars, not paper rubles" to the Soviet Government of $750,000 last year. . . . Verbhid or "Camel" where it costs only 67¢ to produce a bushel of grain as against 87¢ at Gigant. . . .
. . . Gleaming new electric interurban cars at Baku (in Asia) entering an enormous new railway station in Eurasian style (see map sketch). . . . Prosperity in the place where Red oil comes from. . . . Stalin's mother at Tiflis (TIME, Dec. 8). . . . Chiaturi, which produces the manganese used in one U. S. auto out of every two. . . .
. . . Smiling faces (the only ones Mr. Knickerbocker saw in Rucsia) all along the Red Riviera (on the Black Sea), the only place where Bolsheviks relax. . . . Silk stockings. . . . Silk dresses. . . . Nude mixed bathing. . . . The only jazz heard in Russia. . . .
. . . Engineers busy installing the water passages in Colonel Hugh Lincoln Cooper's hydroelectric dam at Dnieprostroy. . . . Col. & Mrs. Cooper & friends living on caviar and canned luxuries from the U. S., cooked by a chef who served the Romanovs. . . . Everyone quoting Lenin's axiom: "Electrification plus the Soviet power equals Socialism. . . ."
. . . Stalina and the maddest coal mines imaginable. . . . Working conditions so arduous that the labor turnover exceeds 100% per year. . . . Miners on all fours, crawling down (sometimes sideways like crabs) to reach their work a mile and a half underground. . . . Red taskmasters sure that to cut passages high enough for the miners to stand erect would cost too much. . . .
. . . Pressure. . . . The feverish, nationwide struggle to complete the Five-Year Plan. . . . 46,651,000 tons of Soviet coal mined this year, an increase of 7,000,000 tons over last year. . . . Marvelous, but somewhat short of the Plan. . . .
Conclusions: "The Plan is a method for Russia to 'starve itself great,' " concluded Correspondent Knickerbocker. "When one draws the balance sheet of the Five-Year Plan [today] at the end of its second year, the credits appear to overbalance the debits. ... No branch of [Russian] industry [has] failed to increase its output. . . . The representative of one of the great central banks of Europe . . . told me he considered the Soviet Union a perfectly sound risk for trade credits up to three or four years."