Man in a Hurry

The great reinforced concrete dam at Kuibyshev stretches nearly three-fourths of a mile across the mighty Volga River. Behind it lies an artificial reservoir 1 1/2 times the size of Great Salt Lake. In its construction, 6.5 billion cu. ft. of earth was excavated--more than was dug out in the building of the Panama Canal. The huge, pale grey power station housing the 20 turbines is 2,000 ft. long, 200 ft. high --twice as large in volume as the gingerbread skyscraper of Moscow University, the tallest building in Russia.

Russians by the thousands crowded the site of Kuibyshev dam last week for the opening of the power station. There were brass bands and the Volga People's Choir, flags and gigantic pictures of Lenin and Nikita Khrushchev. As Party Boss Khrushchev stepped jauntily forward and cut the ribbon stretched across the lock gates, he beamed a toothy smile at cheering excursionists aboard the motorship Dmitry Pozharsky, the first vessel to pass through the locks. He moved on to the engine room of Turbine No. 17 and pulled the handle of the automatic starter. As the turbine began to rotate, sending the first current into the network, Nikita embraced and kissed Electric Welder Aleksei Ulesov, who had just been named a "Hero of Socialist Labor" for the second time.

Victory, But . . . Moving with the rubber-ball energy of a nimble fat man, Khrushchev mounted the red-draped platform opposite the power station. "Dear Comrades!" he cried, and launched into the usual speech of glowing praise. For writing "a glorious new page," the workers were decorated collectively, then and there, with the Order of Lenin. Reminding them that their handiwork was "the largest hydropower station in the world," Khrushchev boasted that "the Americans took over 20 years to build their largest hydropower station, Grand Coulee,"* while "our Soviet workers" needed only seven years for Kuibyshev. "That, comrades, is an outstanding victory!" On the platform with Nikita, the engineers of Kuibyshev beamed at one another; the local party bosses and the chiefs of the Ministry of Electric Power Stations exchanged contented glances.

Then Khrushchev let them have it. Kuibyshev was a wonderful achievement, he repeated, but was it the best way to create electricity? A hydropower station took from seven to ten years to build. But thermal power stations, using natural gas or low-grade coal, could be run up in three years or less. And the "point at issue," cried Nikita, is to win time "in the competition with capitalism, to catch up with and outstrip the United States in the per capita output of the population."

Progress Later. Tersely, Khrushchev ordered work suspended on such vast hydropower plants as Saratov and Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Old-fashioned thermal power, he admitted, would cost more in the long run than hydropower, but it did not require so great an immediate capital outlay, and thus more money could be poured into "industrial and agricultural mechanization." What Nikita failed to mention was that the monumental hydropower stations were a pet scheme of Stalin's and ran counter to Khrushchev's own pet theory of "decentralization."* When would the Soviet Union return to harnessing its water resources to the creation of electricity? Answered Khrushchev: "In our peaceful competition with the capitalist countries, we must gain ten to 15 years. When we have won, and have developed our industry even further, then we will be able to allocate the money needed for hydropower stations."

* Grand Coulee was begun in 1933, completed eight years later. As the need for power increased, additional turbines and powerhouses were installed as required.* As a further step in decentralization, Khrushchev last week demoted his ex-fellow traveler, former Premier Nikolai Bulganin, once again. The B. of B. and K. lost his job as head of the Soviet State Bank and was transferred to a provincial post in the remote northern Caucasus.

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