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They had a top speed of only 500 m.p.h., but they have been surpassed by new models. One of their best: the swift-wing MIG-15, which U.S. jet airmen have met in Korea. It is fast, may well be the equal in speed of the latest U.S. jets in service.
Sea Power. In the last two years Russia has shown signs of wanting to become a major naval power. This ambition was fed by the annihilation of the Japanese navy and the Communist seizure of China, which opened a range of Pacific warm-water bases to the Red navy. But Russia's known navy is negligible except for its growing submarine fleet. It has about 300 submarines now, of which 30 to 40 are snorkel-equipped boats with enough speed and range to travel with a fleet.
For 15 years Russia has had two or three battleships under construction. At least one of them, the Sovietsky Soyuz, may be in commission in the Baltic. Russia is not known to have any carriers, but the Red navy is developing a land-based naval air force.
What Can They Produce?
Soviet industry has dramatically recovered from World War II's losses, and surpassed its prewar level. These are the latest available production figures in millions':
¶ Steel ingots, from 18.3 metric tons in 1940 to 21.2 tons in 1949; ¶ Coal, from 160 to 236 tons; ¶ Oil, from 31 to 34.2 tons; ¶ Aluminum, from 56.7 to 160 tons; ¶ Electricity, from 48,300 to 70,000 kwh.
Much of this progress is due to increased technological skill. By the end of the '30s, the Russians were learning new industrial techniques fast, were just about to reap a modest harvest by the time they switched over to total war production. After the German attack in 1941, thousands of Russian technicians went to the U.S., worked in U.S. factories, took home invaluable industry know-how. The 1940-49 figures show in part how the new knowledge paid off.
The gains do not mean that Russia has greatly increased its capital equipment. Dr. Demitri Shimkin, who served on the U.S. Army's General Staff during the war, and is now with Harvard's Russian Research Center, has concluded from a careful study of postwar Russian production figures that the Russians achieved much of their gains by hard use of their old capital equipment. Shimkin's conclusion seems to indicate that after World War II the Russians decided to go on turning out all the war material they could at top speed—rather than to emphasize capital goods at first so as to be able to turn out larger amounts of war goods later. That involved taking a chance that their present capital equipment would be inadequate for the demands of a future war. Significantly Moscow took that risk in order to be ready for war at any time.
Steel is the pet industry in the U.S.S.R. as it is in any other major power. Soviet steel labor is elite labor, with an efficiency twice that of other Soviet workers. A severe drag on Russian steel production is the fact that 95% of Russia's working iron deposits lie west of the Ural's industrial complex, and 85% of its coking-coal reserves lie east of it. Bringing coal and iron together to make steel puts a heavy strain on Russia's inadequate transport system and slows down the growth of the steel industry.