By SAM RUSSELL : MOSCOW Soviet planners are already ~ ng about what they are ele to do in 45 years time — cart e year 2000. As, down-to- tth realists, they have to. €y must discuss now where sae are going to erect the new a €r stations and new factor- .~ tO Open up vast new areas m Siberia i “ar et: and the Soviet Far Highlight of their plan is to fate in the Far East an in- asitial centre three times as § as the vast Ruhr area of estern Germany. sans is the Angara Valley pro- aes along the river of that name & name to be remembered. inane this and more I learned iete of the most exciting inter- Shae I have ever had when I Gln for two hours with the wea) Old Man of Soviet elec- ua development, 77-year-old Ad €ssor Alexander Winter, atecoe of his principal assis- thes Dr. Arkady Markin, at nis Oviet Academy of Sciences “Tn Research Institute here. Wint the year 2000,” Professor Sg told me, ‘we plan to prod an annual electric power mien, of 10-15 million ton kilowatt-hours (about a times today’s output.) the T main objective will be Whol Complete automation of ee € factories and industrial . “aS with an enormous increase Mass production and the H tion of an abundance of all x S00ds needed for a full life every human being.” it is into this tremen- amework that the Sixth ~Year Plan fits. cr Crea fo dous fr Five the Comp ete automation of “wnole p L aim of Soviet planning, Prof. Alexander Winter told Sam Although undoubtedly am- bitious, this plan pales into insignificance compared with what is envisaged for the year 2000 or even for the nineteen- seventies. Five-year plans were at one time regarded as the height of long-term planning, but now Soviet planners consider this as just short-term. The real long-distance plan- ning has to look at least 15 to 20 years ahead and. the planner must, have ideas of projects of what he wants done 40 years ahead. It was Professor Winter who in December 1917, barely a month after the Revolution, came to see Lenin with plans to start building a power sta- tion for Moscow using local peat. It was with men like Pro- fessor Winter that Lenin pre- pared the first plan for the electrification of Russia in 1920, the plan which formed the basis / of all plans now being worked out and put into operation. It was Professor Winter who designed and built the great Dnieperstroi hydro-electric sta- tion, completed in 1932 with a capacity of 660,000 kilowatts, which was then and still is 20 years later the largest and most powerful in Europe. : These are modest men with their feet on the ground and very conscious of the leeway the Soviet Union has to make up before she can equal the elec- trie power production of the United States per head * of population. ; They told me that in spite of the great progress in the Soviet Union in electric-power pro- a trlal areas is Russe in this exclusive interview. Forerunner of things to come el} = ; Petrie development. S new automatic concrete plant at the Kuibyshev hydro- duction, and she is second in the world in the total amount of electrical energy she produces, she is still only 18th in pro- duction per head. Last year the Soviet Union produced 166,000 million kilo- watts-hours of electricity and she planned to double that with a production of 320,000 million k.w.h. in 1960. But by the nineteen-seventies she plans to treble that figure again with an annual produc- tion of one million million k.w.h. These figures compare with Britain’s production of about 73,000 million k.w.h. last year and 600,000 million k.w.h. in the United States — * To do this, the untapped re- sources of Siberia and the Soviet Far East are to be opened up along rivers like the Ob, Yenisei, Angara and others. A total of 140 new big hydro- electric power stations are to be built. Work has already started on many of them. This development of electrical power is part of a great momve of Soviet industry.and agricul- ture to the east to exploit the riches of the vast under-popula- ted parts of Siberia. For Siberia contains 80-90 percent of Soviet reserves of hydro-electric power, apart from huge resources of coal, iron ore and non-ferrous metals. It has 75 percent of the known iron ore reserves in the Soviet Union, 75 percent of the forests and 80 percent of all her arable land—but power is needed to release these riches. In the Sixth Five-Year Plan the Soviet Union will complete the construction of two giant power stations in European Russia, that at Stalingrad with a capacity of 2,210,000 kilowatts and an annual production of 11,000 million k.w.h., and the one at Kuibyshev with a capacity of 2,100,000 kilowatts and an annual production of 11,400 million k.w.h. But it is in the eastern region of the USSR that the real power giants will be built. One at Bratsk on the Angara River has a scheduled capacity of 2,200,000 kilowatts, which may be increased to 3,600,000. Krasnoyarsk station on the Yenisei also has a scheduled capacity of 3,200,000 kilowatts, while other power giants with a five million kilowatt capacity are planned. These astronomical figures compare with the biggest hydro- electric power station in .the world at the moment, the Grand Coulee Dam in the U.S. with a capacity of 2,314,000 kilowatts. A series of great hydro- electric stations are planned along the River Angara. Great hydro-electric projects in Soviet Asia, dwarfing even the Kui yshev project shown above under construction, are being prepared by Soviet planners. USSR plans for year 2000 XE LRKIGATION “teeet® y ‘ VA GORE Noss aL eae = < =} By og rag KARA #: piace © TEHERAN ‘we * Kum \:. a os STALINABED o Miles 150 [7 trapeeest 50 300 _40 } at SP bet Ar cuanistan =e ENGLAND | = 3 fe same segle 3 = R DAMS AND “Aval. es RESEVOIRS cE 67% o Thousands of Soviet citizens, like those shown in top picture, are pioneering new territery in Asia. of a planned development. But the pioneering is part : New industries and cities are being built, new farmlands opened to cultivation. New development and reclamation projects, like the Kara Karum project (see map at bottom), are going forward. They will form the basis of a series of industrial and town- building projects which will be supplied with the cheapest and most abundant electric power in the whole world, creating the “three Ruhr’s” of which these scientists spoke. * What about the development of atomic power? | I found Professor Winter and his colleague remarkably modest in their claim. All they said was that they hoped to be among the first to start the large- scale production of atomic power. A number of atomic energy stations of 50,000 and 100,000 kilowatts capacity are now be- ing planned and built in the Soviet Union. — But I found them very scep- tical of American claims to be able to build by 1957 atomic power stations with a_ total capacity of 40 to 60 million kilo- watts. They were equally doubtful about British claims that it would be possible to stop the construction of‘ thermo-nuclear power stations by 1975 and con- centrate on atomic power ‘sta- tions only. : In the meantime they are con- tinuing with their plans for ‘ordinary thermo-electrie and hydro electric stations, improv- ing their technique and increas- ing their size as the first step towards extracting from the soil of Siberia the untold wealth that lies there.