Word: siberians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These days when U.S. businessmen venture into Moscow to explore trade possibilities, they frequently have in mind a simple machines-for-minerals deal−their technology in return for Siberian natural gas, for example. Soviet leaders, who have been criticized at home for planning to turn Russia into what dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov once termed a "raw-material supply appendage" for the West, are extremely sensitive about such proposals. They are far more receptive to plans that allow the Soviets to pay for the U.S. technology they want with the very goods that will be produced by using that technology...
...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...
...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...
...life in the Arctic area is enough to deter many. Siberia boosters used to claim that the population would climb from its present 25 million to about 60 million by the year 2000; the current rate of growth is unlikely to produce more than about half that number. All Siberian workers, from a waitress in Yakutsk to a drilling engineer at Nadym, get "northern bonuses" that double and triple Moscow wage rates, but the labor turnover is nonetheless high. Every year 17,000 new workers arrive in the Irkutsk region, and 10,000 others leave. Some of these are students...
...Siberians love the space and clean air, the pleasures of camping in the short but vivid summer, the beauty of the woods in spring and fall. "One freezing night in Irkutsk," reports Correspondent Shaw, "I went with a group of local poets to a poetry reading at an engineering plant. Three hundred young workers, mostly pretty girls, turned up to listen to poetry. When the poets had finished, they insisted that I contribute whatever I could remember. Being cheered for verses remembered from school days by an audience of Siberian factory hands is a memory to cherish...