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The promise of Siberia is still largely promise, however. The vast land is far from tamed. Although sleek new Yak 40 minijets now dart from city to city and the Trans-Siberian Railroad provides a 6,000-mile spinal column from Moscow to the Pacific, riverboats and horse-drawn sleds still provide the lifelines from one wooden village to the next. In many places bears are more plentiful than people, and hunters frequently have to eject them from the food-stocked little huts that are established as survival stations.
To exploit the newly discovered treasures of Siberia, the Soviets have undertaken what may be the greatest construction effort in history. A quarter of all Soviet development capital is now going into building pipelines, highways, railroads and entire cities all across Siberia. The scheduled cost of Siberian development in the present five-year plan (1971-75) is $100 billion, and economists say that the figure will increase in the next plan. Soviet authorities used to bar foreigners from the area for security reasons, but the costs of development are so staggering that Moscow is now actively courting foreign investment and technological know-how. It is negotiating with Japan for help in financing a $3 billion, 4,380-mile pipeline from the Tyumen oilfields to the Pacific port of Nakhodka; and it is trying hard to get long-term U.S. credits.
"Siberia's prospects and potential are of continental scale," cabled TIME's Moscow Bureau Chief John Shaw after a 5,000-mile swing through the region. "It is as though North America were being rediscovered. The delays and errors of Soviet planners have been considerable, but so have many of their achievements. In the face of fierce winters and broiling summers, when the tundra thaws just enough to become a mosquito-ridden swamp, Siberia has been converted into a force to be reckoned with in the world economy."
Some key projects:
TYUMEN, a province in western Siberia where the first rich find of gas and oil was discovered, lies at the southern edge of a vast field stretching 1,000 miles down the Ob River. Its oil production, which has doubled every year since 1965, is expected to hit 130 million tons by 1975, comparable to half of Saudi Arabia's output. A spur from the Trans-Siberian Railroad has been completed between the provincial capital of Tyumen and Tobolsk—both sleepy towns become boom cities—and is being extended 300 miles northward to Surgut.
SAMOTLOR, beneath the 100-sq.-mi. Lake Samotlor, is believed to be the world's richest single oil deposit, comparable in potential to the entire Alaskan North Slope. When fully developed, it will have more than 3,000 producing wells. Despite cold so extreme that steel becomes brittle and brake fluids freeze, Soviet drilling and construction crews are expanding production at a rate previously achieved only in Libya.
NADYM, a gas field discovered four years ago, contains 6 trillion cubic meters of gas, equivalent to three-quarters of U.S. reserves. A river port, rail spur and 600-mile gas line have been carved out of the desolate tundra, and by 1978 gas will be sent to West Europe. Three American companies are considering building a $7 billion pipeline 2,000 miles to Murmansk for shipment of liquefied gas to the U.S. East Coast.