Siberia. The Russian name originally meant sleeping land, and so it has been since the beginning of history. For millenniums, men came and went in this vast expanse and scarcely left a mark. Ancient hunters in animal skins tracked the mammoth through the taiga—the deep silent forests of pines and birches. Nomadic tribesmen pushed up from the south, grazing their cattle and roaming on. Then the thunder of horses reverberated across the steppes, bearing the predatory banners of Genghis Khan. Chinese prospectors ranged northward to comb the wilderness for ginseng roots, the source of miraculous cures. The land echoed with the sad clanking of the chains that fettered the czars' prisoners, and then with the sighs of all those thousands who continued to be banished, body and soul, after the Bolshevik Revolution. "How many mysteries does the taiga hide in its enormity!" wrote Anton Chekhov. Siberia—land of ice and tears.
Engineer Roman Kuzovatkin turns a tap on a loop of steel pipe that juts from a snowbank near Samotlor. A spurt of fine black oil sprays the surrounding drifts. Moments later, a helicopter whips up a snowstorm as it takes off to ferry equipment to construction crews that are dynamiting the frozen earth to lay new pipelines. Farther to the north in the Nadym gas fields hard by the Arctic Circle, the long nights are thunderously lit by giant flares of blazing gas. It will soon light Western Europe and may one day heat New York. Two thousand miles to the southeast, gigantic cranes rear against the brilliant wilderness sky as they erect the skeleton of a new dam, half a mile long and 300 ft. high, across the frozen Angara River. Up in Yakutia, where temperatures dip to -90° F., reindeer-driven sleds bring supplies to geological-survey teams charting the wasteland for coal, iron and gas.
This is the new Siberia, an eastern El Dorado whose riches promise to make the Soviet Union of the 21st century the wealthiest nation on earth. Since the first oil well gushed forth in Tyumen province in 1960, Siberia has been found to contain the largest gas and oil reserves of any country in the world. Almost every day brings new discoveries. Geological maps are outdated as soon as they are printed. Scientists now believe that the entire region, equivalent in size to all of North America, is like a giant raft floating on a sea of gas and oil.
Siberia also has the world's largest deposits of iron ore and coal, virgin forests as large as all of Europe, half the world's gold production and diamond deposits matching those of South Africa. Half a dozen great rivers, all flowing north into the Arctic Ocean, may one day provide hydroelectric power across the Bering Strait for Canada and the U.S. It is not so wild a dream. Already the Russians have built the world's largest dams on the Yenisei and Angara rivers at Krasnoyarsk and Bratsk, and a third one is going up at Ust-Ilimsk (see map page 39). The riches of Siberia may well figure largely in China's border dispute with the Soviet Union. Other governments, including the U.S. and Japan, are also eying Siberia's resources for commercial development.