RUSSIA: Hungry Desert

Daring, farsighted, iron-willed Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin last week unfolded yet another phase of his famed Five-Year Program (TIME, Sept. 9 et ante), designed to make Red Russia economically independent of the rest of the world by 1933. Today the Soviet Union grows in Russian Turkestan 50% of the cotton it consumes, imports the rest from the U. S. and Egypt. How much more cotton can Turkestan be made to yield? For weeks the Soviet Supreme Economic Council has been thrashing out that question with a sagacious and experienced U. S. citizen, Engineer Arthur Powell Davis, 68, who for nine years was Director of the Bureau of Reclamation at Washington.

Last week the Council and Mr. Davis announced a bold solution of Russia’s cotton problem. Into the vast parched plain known as the Golodnaya Steppes or “Hungry Desert” two mighty rivers will be diverted. One, the Amudaria, is famed as the longest stream in Asiatic Russia (1,500 mi.). Superstitious peasants call it “The Strewer of Life.” The other river is the Sirdaria, “The Giver of Gold.” Together they will supply 10,000 cubic feet of water per second for one of the vastest irrigation projects of modern times. Once watered, the “Hungry Desert” will present ideal conditions for growing cotton, should double the present output of Turkestan. Last week Mr. Davis told Moscow correspondents that $250,000,000 will be spent on this stupendous irrigation work, said that he will supervise. Pressed for details he spoke with mounting excitement:

“The Soviet Government by its decision today will probably make the greatest single contribution to human advancement in this remote and dreaded part of middle Asia since Russia was founded 1,000 years ago.

“In some parts of the Great Kizil Kum Desert, cotton was cultivated 10,000 years before Christ, but these plantations have long since been obliterated by the shifting sands. With expert American help the Soviet government intends to make the rivers in Turkestan do for this enormous barren area what the rivers of California and other States have done for American waste land.

“The project covers almost every square mile of arid area in Turkestan down to the Afghanistan boundary and northward to the 42nd parallel, which is at the mouth of the Amudaria River, and includes the great plains over which Tamerlane, Alex ander the Great and other warriors marched their conquering but weary hordes.”

“Nowhere in the world, not even in the famous Valley of Death in California, is there such a forbidding, barren district as this, where water is of even greater value than gold and which is strewn with the bones of cattle and camels which perished from thirst.”

“The Russian Imperial governments of other days set out to conquer Turkestan for the Tsars. The Soviet regime is wisely using more peaceful and productive methods of conquest by making the rivers give life to thousands of square miles for new human habitations, hundreds of thou sands of cattle and camels and millions of acres of agricultural products.”

Irrigation-conscious observers recalled that Russia is already third among nations in the extent of her artificially watered areas.

Nation Acres Irrigated

India 50,000,000

U. S. 20,000,000

Russia 8,000,000

Japan 7,000,000

Egypt 6,000,000

Mexico 5,700,000

Italy 4,500,000

Spain 3,500,000

France 3,150,000