Atom Blasts & TV Sets: Siberia Is Still Empty, but Bursting witb Raw Power

ATOM BLASTS & TV SETS

The Kara Sea, usually mantled by ice and fog, glared with the blinding light of a multimegaton explosion. Some 1,500 miles to the south, in the stony uplands above Semipalatinsk, another nuclear bomb went off in a ball of fire, thrusting a column of fallout into the upper atmosphere. Thus last week, from one end of Siberia to another, Nikita Khrushchev continued to shock the world with almost daily detonations of nuclear weapons.

Because of official Soviet silence, ordinary Siberians knew nothing about the explosions. They kept doggedly at their tasks of plowing virgin lands, tunneling through mountains, erecting steel mills and bridges, building new cities and rebuilding old ones. On Vladivostok, dozens of new apartment buildings climbed up the wooded hills overlooking Golden Horn Bay. The citizens of Omsk, surrounded by a treeless steppe, were paving more and more streets with asphalt in an effort to end the dust storms that have plagued them for centuries. Irkutsk swarmed with thousands of students beginning the new school year at the city’s three universities, two medical colleges and eight technical institutes. On Lake Baikal, the deepest in the world, fishermen cast their nets for the tasty omul.

This contrast between the bombs and a vigorous frontier existence is only the latest version of a contrast familiar to Siberia, always a land both of life and death, of vitality and horror.

The new Siberia—rarely visited, even more rarely photographed, by outsidersis—is big, brawling, self-confident. TIME herewith presents eight pages of color pictures by Photographer John Launois, who, with TIME Correspondent Don Connery, traveled across Siberia from the Sea of Japan to Moscow.

Snowbound Dark. Despite obvious progress, Siberia continues to evoke terror in European Russia. Moscow University graduates are plunged into despair when ordered to emigrate east of the Urals. Workers and peasants are so reluctant to settle in the virgin lands that the Soviet government must tempt them with tax exemptions, bank credits and free grain.

To most Russians, as to most of the world, Siberia means desolation and exile. In the old days it seemed a trackless waste infested by brodyagi, branded criminals with slit noses and lashed backs who had escaped from convict prisons and lived by robbery and murder. Siberia was synonymous with space, silence, emptiness and snowbound darkness for 20 hours of every winter’s day. The grim land was said to unhinge men’s minds: bored Czarist officers in isolated forts broke the monotony by playing Russian roulette. Settlers in the barren north fell victim to “arctic hysteria.”

Today’s Siberia contains remnants of the past. There are still dismal, muddy villages like those where Dostoevsky and other political exiles suffered their dark night of the soul. Most of the Communist labor camps have been closed, but the ghosts of those who died in them are as palpable as the polar blizzards heralding Siberia’s long winter. The cities are still cluttered with the wooden hovels of yesteryear, peasant women still do their laundry in the icy rivers, and men still wear the padded-cotton clothing of China. Horsetail Banners. But there have been vast changes as well. Under the Communists, the population of Siberia has more than doubled to nearly 19 million. The free, windswept steppes that once knew the horsetail banners and the hoofbeat thunder of Genghis Khan and his ferocious Golden Horde are now filled with the clank of harvesters in wheatfields stretching to the horizon. Communist Young Pioneers on vacation play volleyball on river banks where Kirghiz nomads used to light their campfires. In the frozen north, villages that were cut off from the world by the fall of the first snow now get airlifted supplies and visitors all winter long.

Factory chimneys, grain elevators, the steel pylons of power lines rise above the plains. In the foothills of the Urals, Magnitogorsk lies on the slope of a magnetic mountain, which is fed ton by ton into the city’s open-hearth and blast furnaces, making it the greatest metallurgical center in the Soviet Union. Nearby Sverdlovsk used to be known as Ekaterinburg, and was chiefly famous as the spot where, in 1918, the Bolsheviks executed Czar Nicholas II and his family. Today its 800,000 people build machine tools, TV sets, railroad cars and ball bearings.

Spaced across Siberia, at approximately 1,000-mile intervals, are three other industrial complexes. One is based on the coal and iron ore of the Kuznetsk Basin, the second on the hydroelectric power of the Angara River, the third on the mines of Yakutia.

Typical City. Because of the dreary similarity of the “official” architecture, Russian cities tend to look alike. In Siberia it is even more so, since a raw frontier flavor still persists. Irkutsk is typical of Siberian cities, sprawling across both banks of the Angara River and surrounded by industrial suburbs whose factories turn out plywood as well as machine tools; bricks, knitwear and cement as well as tractors. In the city, the old is carelessly mixed with the new. Many streets are potholed and puddled, lined with haphazard wooden hovels that have leaned crazily for years. Others are wide, tree-shaded asphalt boulevards, flanked with government buildings, theaters, stores and hotels. Irkutsk’s citizens are hustled to work in jammed buses in the mornings, and when the day’s labor is finished, hurry home again to the cramped wooden huts or the crowded grey-and-yellow apartment blocks, exactly like those in Minsk and Pinsk and Omsk.

For sportsmen, Siberia is as rewarding as the U.S. West. In summer, entire families go berry picking, and fishermen have their choice of a hundred tumbling trout streams. Fall brings the traditional Russian search for mushrooms in the forests, and hunters throng the duck blinds on the reedy shores of Siberia’s many lakes. Winter offers skiing and ice skating. In spring, however, Siberia is as frustrating as almost all Communist countries. Boy can meet girl, but he finds it impossible to take her anywhere that they can be alone. Even if boy marries girl, there is little chance for privacy. The city administration boasts that housing in Irkutsk has doubled since 1931—but the population has tripled. The inevitable result is the crowding of too many people into too few rooms.

The Wild East. Siberia stayed underpopulated so long because newcomers recoiled from the first experience of its immensity and climate: January temperatures plummet to 100° below, while August temperatures soar to 120° above. Nature shaped the land with a grim hand. In prehistoric times, Siberia was a vast ocean, and its topography still resembles that of a shallow sea bottom, raised at the edges by a saucer-rim of mountains, with few barriers against wind or sun. The flat landscape is banded by four distinct regions—the icy northern shelf of the tundra, where nothing grows except moss, lichen and dwarf shrub; the dense forest zone, or the taiga, where arctic birches sprout beside palm trees; the steppe, a black earth meadowland which, when properly farmed, is among the most productive soils in the world; and farthest south, the deserts. In this overwhelming setting, Russia made its way much as the U.S. did in its Far West. In each case there were nomadic tribes—the Tartars, Kirghiz and Samoyeds in Siberia like the Indians in America—who learned to their cost that bows and arrows seldom win against muskets and cannon.*

The Russians protected each advance against the tribes by a line of forts which in time became villages of Russian settlers, mostly runaway serfs or religious dissenters willing to take the risks of frontier life. Then came the long columns of political prisoners (among them: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin). During one 75-year period in the 19th century, nearly a million exiles and their families were shipped to Siberia. Another million settlers were drawn from Moscow’s subject races: rebellious Ukrainians, Poles, Baits, and dissident mountaineers from the Caucasus.

Superior Types. Out of this amalgam, and subsequent injections of “free” settlers, emerged today’s Sibiryak, who bears a certain relation to today’s Texan. Both are convinced that their flat, featureless lands supply them with an almost Antaean strength, a native competence and a pride that often seems oppressive to strangers. Paradoxically, the vast prison colony was also a region of independence, because the exiles who were sent to Siberia brought with them a spirit of political free thought. Moreover, Siberia never had serfs, since there was plenty of land for all. In House Without a Roof, Maurice Hindus, a recent visitor to Siberia, says that to a Sibiryak his country is “a superior land, with its special blessings, breeding a superior type of humanity, more hardy, more adventurous, more fearless than European Russians . . . [This] left a heritage of self-assertiveness which, though repressed by the Soviets, has not died out.”

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Moscow in 1917, they very nearly lost the treasure house of Siberia. White Russian armies conquered all the way to the Urals; U.S. and Japanese troops occupied the Pacific ports. It took four years of bloody war before Siberia became the Soviet Far East. During World War II, as Nazi armies smashed near to Moscow, entire factories and their workers were piled onto freight cars and moved to safety behind the Urals. And there they stayed.

The New Tartars. Soviet scientists turned in staggering reports. Siberia, they said, contained three-fourths of all Russian coal and four-fifths of its forests and water power. Oil was found on Sakhalin Island, diamonds in Yakutia, new gold fields on the Pacific coast. Prospectors discovered reserves of bauxite, tin, zinc, lead, nickel and mica. A single iron field in the lower reaches of the Angara River is estimated to contain between 4 and 5 billion tons of ore.

On the resources of this enormous and still underdeveloped land, Khrushchev hopes to build the ultimate triumph of Communism, whether it comes in “peaceful” competition with capitalism or in the horror of nuclear war. His urgent drive to populate Siberia may well have another aim: to fill its emptiness with Russians before the hungry millions of China—the new Golden Horde—flood across the border as they already have into Manchuria and Tibet.

* To Russian ears, the Tartar name of Khan Kuchum’s capital, conquered in 1581, sounded like Sibir and, by extension, all the land beyond the Urals became Siberia.