Russia is an Asiatic country, and I myself am an Asiatic, Joseph Stalin once told a Japanese diplomat. "Our country is both European and Asiatic. The largest part of our territory lies on the Asian continent." said roly-poly First Party Secretary Khrushchev five months ago in India. Last week Stalin's heirs were showing increasing determination to make Asians out of millions of other Russians.
Some 1,200,000 Red army soldiers, ostensibly discharged as a gesture toward disarmament, were being urged to settle in the New Lands of the Soviet Far East. In the party organizations, half a million young Communists were being pressured to "Go East." In the public press, special inducements (tax exemptions, individual grants, free grain and flour, and bank credits of $2,500 for the building of houses and barns) were offered to peasants and workers to stake their future in the Eastern regions. Propaganda painted the effort as a "Great Adventure," the prospect as the opening of a "New Frontier." Trainloads of Russian hopefuls trekking eastward this year began what promised to be one of the great population migrations of recent times.
Everything Enormous. The country to which they were bound was Siberia. An area nearly twice the size of the U.S., stretching across the top of the globe from Europe to Alaska, bound by polar wastes in the north and the world's largest mountain ranges in the south, Siberia has potential mineral, agricultural and electric-power resources beyond calculation. But its winters are the coldest on earth. In the past, both Czarist and Soviet regimes have had to force people to live and work there. Tens of millions of hapless human slaves, cutting timber, tilling the bleak steppe, or digging through the permafrost (in some places 75 ft. deep) to get at the gold, iron, coal, copper, nickel, uranium, titanium, magnesium and bauxite have laid the foundations of a series of vast industrial enterprises. To develop this industry, the Soviet Union now needs the skills and crafts of mil lions of willing, i.e., voluntary, workers, and agricultural producers to feed them.
A mountain of iron in the southern Urals was the core of the first Soviet in dustrial complex. Last year the Urals and western Siberia alone produced more pig iron than Great Britain. The magnetic mountain at Magnitogorsk has been swallowed in the furnaces, and ore now comes from mines far away. A thousand miles deeper into Siberia is the Kuznetsk basin, where it is planned to produce 80 million tons of coal a year by 1960. Around Kuznetsk, in fast-growing industrial cities —Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, Krasnoyarsk, and at Karaganda some way to the southwest—are new steel mills, blast furnaces and aluminum plants, with auxiliary industries proliferating.