Center Shifted

How well can Russia take advantage of her size? Can she survive if European Russia is lost? These were questions that puzzled observers last week, as Russia fought desperately on her western borders.

Withdrawing into the vastness of Asia is no new idea to Russian officials. Since 1928, chief trend of the three Five-Year Plans has been to open up Siberia and the East. Designated for years as Russia's "Chungking" has been Sverdlovsk, 950 miles east of Moscow in the Urals.

> Job of the first Plan was to build a base of heavy industry far from dangerous European borders. Around the biggest coal deposit in the world, in the Kuznetsk Basin in mid-Siberia, mines were opened, steel mills built. The huge magnetic iron-ore mountain at Magnitogorsk in the Urals got other mills. A tractor and rifle factory went up at Chelyabinsk near by.

> The second Plan opened new mines and industries, with ports in the Arctic at the mouth of the Lena and Kolyma Rivers. Later defense industries and power plants were constructed as far east as Lake Baikal, new oil fields opened in the Urals. Most railroad construction under the Plans was in the East, and as population followed production, agriculture and food industries followed too.

> One purpose of the Plans was defensive --to shift Russia's center of gravity to the hinterland--and official statistics now put 33% of Russia's coal, power, iron, 80% of her copper production east of the Urals. But how well the Five-Year Plans have succeeded otherwise no one outside of Russia and few inside know. Doubtless the center of gravity has not yet shifted as far as Russian leaders wish.

> Should the Germans reach the Volga, Russia would lose 75% of her man power, two-thirds of her coal, iron and steel, most of her oil. Resistance then, even with a moderately intact Army, would be physically very difficult and perhaps politically impossible.

> Biggest single difficulty of a Russian Government pushed east of Moscow would be transportation. There are virtually no roads, only two north-south rail lines east of Moscow. Both are single-tracked. Only major transportation line through most of Siberia is the east-west Trans-Siberian Railway. Even if all existing industry ran full time at full capacity, few could see how Russia would run an industrial economy and fight a modern war, with such transportation.

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