Miracle in the East

Last week four U.S. correspondents, including TIME'S Richard Lauterbach, returned to Moscow with the vision of a new, raw world still in their eyes. By permission of Marshal Stalin, they had gone with Eric Johnston into the industrial empire beyond the Urals.

Inevitably, they saw Magnitogorsk, biggest and best known of the new steel cities (TIME, Jan. 17). They found it crowded with evacuees from ravaged western Russia (some are going back home now). The life is rougher, tougher than in most cities, but the people work hard, seem happy. Said Works Director Nosov: "Two or three years after the war we will have time to build thousands of new individual homes, streetcar lines, roads, theaters, cinemas, clubs, restaurants." But now--in Novosibirsk, Omsk, Tashkent, Alma-Ata--production for war is all that matters. In the 15 years since Stalin decreed the creation of this industrial reserve in Asiatic Russia, the Soviet Union had achieved neither the capacity nor the efficiency of the industrial U.S. But the Russians had done a miraculous job.

Nice Place, Omsk. Everywhere the correspondents saw the signs and fruits of the vast migration from western Russia. In Omsk, young workers scrubbed clean of factory dirt danced to Russian and U.S. jazz. They had come from all parts of the Soviet Union. Some were anxious to get home, but most seemed to think Omsk a nice place to live and learn, were willing to do what the State decreed.

Omsk's Mayor is 44-year-old Kuzma Koshelev, an ex-peasant from White Russia. He has his troubles. Fuel must be hauled 200 to 1,000 miles. Nine brickyards turning out 86 million bricks a year have been unable to catch up with the housing shortage. Water is scarce. But matters have improved steadily through the war.

Russian Chicago. Novosibirsk is becoming one of the world's great cities, the Chicago of Russia. It had 100,000 population in 1925, now has 700,000. The outlook of its leaders is like that of last century's western Americans. The double-laned Krasny Prospekt is one of Russia's finest avenues. An $8,000,000, 2,000-seat opera house is rich in red velvet, lush statuary, a Phantom-of-the-Opera chandelier, a 105 by 105 ft. stage with an electrically driven, concrete safety curtain.

Novosibirsk Secretary of the Communist Party is tough, wiry, 44-year-old Mikhail Kulagin. He looks and acts like a cross between Jimmy Cagney and a Rotary greeter. Politically, he is a sort of Russian Jim Farley, slapping backs, shaking hands. Everyone knows him, wants a private word with him. He sent regards to his old pals, Hank Wallace and Don Nelson, who met him during their travels in Russia.

Prodigious Apple. Alma-Ata is a beautiful city amid the snow-capped Altai Mountains. This capital of the Kazak Republic is nearer Chungking than Moscow. It has 400,000 population (40,000 in 1925), was not reached by the railroad until 1929.

Kazakstan is a vast republic, and it has everything. But up to now it has mostly gone in for scientific farming.

Apple production is 25 times what it was in 1914, grape acreage has multiplied ten times. Orchards are irrigated by underground pipes. Farm workers get $60 monthly, a farm director $340. Last year farm workers got bonuses in kind: 400 Ibs. of apples, 300 Ibs. of plums, 1,400 Ibs. of melons, tomatoes, pumpkins, beets, etc.

In Kazakstan as elsewhere in the Soviet East, there are prodigies. A full-grown apple may weigh nearly two pounds.

Samarkand is like Southern California. It has a self-preserving apricot that ripens, dries on the tree. Windfalls on the ground stay in good condition for a month, enabling one man to harvest 200 acres.

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