RUSSIA: No. 6

Out of the barren steppes behind the Ural Mountains more than a decade ago Soviet workers wrested a city of iron: Magnitogorsk. They paid for it with blood and sweat and countless rubles. They built it with modern tools and with their naked hands, and they are still building it today. The reward for them, and for those who built other great industrial centers in the Urals, was nothing less than the salvation of their country from the Germans.

On Christmas Day, 1943, Magnitogorsk had a celebration. The first red rivulet of molten iron flowed from the sixth blast furnace to be erected in the city, the second to be built there since the war began.

The Iron Core. Magnitogorsk was named for a mountain which contained 275,000,000 tons of 62% pure magnetic iron ore. With the rest of the Soviet Union's Urals development, it was the iron core of Russian resistance after the Germans seized the industrial Ukraine. Today its furnaces, blooming, billet, rolling and wiredrawing mills, its machine shops and aluminum plants cover 2 7 square miles. The furnaces produce more steel than all of Russia under the Czars; and Magnitogorsk is still expanding.

In size and in speed of construction, No. 6 furnace set new records. The Russians like to say that they followed "the methods of Henry Kaiser" in building No. 6; it was assembled five times faster than the Russians had ever built a furnace before, finished in less than six months. Its builders' greatest pride: it was made entirely of Soviet materials. It will produce enough pig iron each month for 1,500 tanks.

Construction Chief Alexander Svistunov divided his labor forces (two-thirds of them were youths) into 150 crews, had each compete for the honor of being "Frontline Brigade," awarded only when a crew produces one and a half times its daily quota. Seventy crews won the honor. To them, Marshal Stalin sent thanks and congratulations; for them, No. 6 was called Youth Furnace.

Magnitogorsk's No. 7 furnace, planned for 1944, may be the world's largest.