Word: siberias
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...Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, it is "the project of the century." In the Soviet press, it is BAM. But whatever it is called, the Soviet Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway is the biggest construction project under way anywhere in the world today. To tap directly into the varied resources of Siberia, the Soviets are laying track across a 1,965-mile stretch of wilderness running from the frontier town of Ust-Kut near Lake Baikal to an eastern terminus at Komsomolsk, 565 miles north of Vladivostok. By the time the last rail is laid in 1983, the cost of the project...
While our plane came in for a landing, Siberia loomed as a forbidding vista of seismic scars and snowcapped mountain ranges. Our destination: a tiny pioneer village aptly named Alonka (wasteland). The temperature: 50° F. below zero. On even chillier days, the cold at Alonka becomes literally audible: the moisture of exhaled breath freezes instantly, and the colliding crystals make a rustling sound. The Jeep-like vehicles used by the construction crews had quilts on their hoods; at a bridge construction site, workers were busy "cooking" concrete in warm elevated shacks before pouring it into foundations. The bridge, begun...
Since the days of the czars, the Russians have dreamed of harvesting Siberia's wealth, but its remoteness has frustrated them. As one Soviet expert on BAM puts it: "When God was distributing the elements over the earth, he grew tired when he got here, mixed up everything he had left, and dumped it haphazardly." BAM will eventually carry a marvelously mixed bag of these riches: petroleum from major new oilfields in Western Siberia, coal from Neryungri and Chulman, iron ore and gold from Aldan, diamonds from Yakutia, and salt, asbestos, molybdenum, copper, tin and bauxite from various areas...
Kosygin then resorted to his more vicious side. Kosygin is aggressive and a bureaucrat. He is noted in the Soviet Union for having served for thirteen years in government posts under Stalin without being liquidated by Beria-the Stalin Minister of the Interior-or sent to Siberia, as was the fate of all those who worked under Stalin. Not one of them except Kosygin was spared-as Khrushchev told us when he visited Egypt...
This jungle Siberia is the maximum-security wing of a detention system that may give Laos the sad distinction of having more political prisoners per capita than any other country...