Books: The Siberian Bastion

SOVIET ASIA—Raymond Arthur Davies & Andrew J. Steiger— Dial ($3).

Soviet Asia is a vast, vague question mark. There are rumors of gigantic new factories in its Far West and there are rumors of armed vigilance in its Far East. Few Americans know much about either. To Canadian Journalist Davies and U.S. Journalist Steiger, who have fellow-traveled there extensively, Siberia is far from vague. They regard it as the key to Allied victory.

Half a Continent. Soviet Asia is bounded on the west by the 2,000-mile watershed of the Ural Mountains and bends its breadth upon half the planet, to end within dory distance of Alaska. Siberia is almost half of Asia, and more than seven-eighths of the Soviet Union. To all but the Russians, and to most of them, it was for centuries as dark as Africa.

During the past 20 years Siberia has been the stage for one of the swiftest, most abrupt and feverish social and political developments the world has known. How massive that development may be, the rest of the world began to suspect when most of the industrial Ukraine went under, and Russia continued to arm herself from the Siberian arsenal.

The strength of Soviet Asia lies in its mineral resources, its rich agricultural production, its factories and its geographic position. Lying close to nine countries on three continents, it enters into "the military-strategic aspect of almost every front, excepting the Libyan and the Atlantic." Only at its extreme frontiers is Siberia really vulnerable.

The Urals are the chief seat of Soviet Asia's industrial power, "the inner bastion of Russian defense." The Magnitogorsk Steel Mill, which since 1936 has produced the cheapest pig iron in Russia, supports a mushroom metropolis of 200,000. The Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant, the world's biggest, now turns out tanks and armored cars. Twenty years ago Ekaterinburg, where the last Tsar and his family were shot in a cellar, was a city of 25,000. Now renamed Sverdlovsk, it is the junction of seven railroad lines, has a population of 450,000.

Western Siberia, stretching from the Urals to the Yenisei River, is the least vulnerable area in Russia. Machinery made in its "gigantic new plants" supplies the farms and the factories of most of Soviet Asia. In the Krasnoyarsk Territory (still only 12% explored) are 154 coal beds totaling an estimated 670 billion tons. There are another 500 billion tons at Kuznetzk, producing 20,000,000 tons a year. Within 100 miles of Kuznetzk there are an estimated 500,000,000 tons of iron ore. In 1912 the total commercial output for the Novosibirsk Region was $33,000,000, and the products were mainly agrarian. In 1937 the total was $533,000,000, and the products were mainly industrial.

Kazakhstan is the terminus of an ancient (and improved) silk and spice trail which, in the authors' opinion, has been even more important to China than the Burma Road. Kazakhstan is first in the Soviet Union in copper mining, second in tin and gold, third in coal and petroleum. In the south, kok-sagyz, a rubber-yielding dandelion, is Russia's No. 2 source for rubber.*

The Siberian Arctic, until recently a grim prospect even for an Eskimo, has begun to yield to plane, radio, icebreaker.