HE geography
& of the Soviet >
Union is not such as
to make life easy.
The rivers flow the
wrong way. Particu-
larly in Asia, they
flow northward and
empty vast amounts
water into the

Arctic Ocean. These
rivers do little good.
They create great
marshes. They pour
water into the Arctic

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An outline of the area to be developed.

Nature gets

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a face-lifting
The USSR embarks
raise a sea’s level,

on a 15-year plan

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NE (uaa togones

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‘fo stop winds
create a 3000-mile long river

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By
>, WILLIAM
MANDEL

Another thing wrong is that
winds arise in Central Asian des-
erts and, in some years, blow
westward into Europe and across
_the Ukraine. The winds contain

westward they bring drought and
crop failure. ‘In addition, these
‘hot, dry winds pick up dried-out
topsoil and desert dust, and de-
posit it in vast masses on the
eastern borderlands of the Uk-
raine, the area around Stalingrad
cn the Volga, and farther west to
: For about 10 years prior to the
Second World War, Soviet author-
‘ities worked experimentally on a
‘Plan to stop the wind from blow-
ing, and on a plan to raise the
evel of the Caspian Sea, the larg-
@st inland body of water in the
‘world, 760 miles long. It had fall-
en to a level dangerous to naviga-
tion because of reduced water in-
take. They worked to prevent the
Sun from evaporating the snow;

Ro moisture. When they blow

ond; 100 miles to the west a third,
and 100 miles to the west a fourth.

In addition to these three belts
to stop the wind blowing from
Central Asia, every one of those
treeless prairie farms in the Uk-
raine is to be belted with trees
occuping about five percent of its
acreage, and abcut 10 percent of
the area that it actuaily ploughs
to crops of any kind.

By every farm, I- don’t mean
€very one of those such as existed
in the Ukraine in the old days,
little strips of land so narrow you
could hardly turn a tractor on

them. I mean the collective farms

ef today, hundreds or thousar:ds
of acres in size. ;
In the course of this work, the
Soviet Union has opened hun-
dreds of forestation stations, new
government depots with special
ploughs and tractors devoted

By H. KOTEK ©

# hae FREE people of the world
have witnessed many trials

of war criminals, but the trial
of the instigators of the “Koe-
penick Bloodweek” proved to be
one of the most shocking. Shock-
ing because the crimes were com-
mitted at a time which most of
the world still regarded as peace-
On June 21, 1933, Hitler’s brown-

_ shirted SA stormtroopers in Ber-

lin’s working-class district of
Koepenick, beat up hundreds of
Social Democrats, Communists,
Jews and other opponents of
f is : a

They dragged them into Nazi
beer-halls and tortured them in

Over 70 people disappeared
completely “in consequence. Later

_ 11 more bodies, sewn up in sacks,

were fished out of the river
Dahme; one body was found in

only to ploughing the land for
planting those trees, with new
forestry personnel trained in new
colleges for this purpose, backed
hy huge appropriations of money
from the‘ national treasury.

Imagine the confidence in the
future this involves. The plant-
ing of the trees alone is to take
15 years, and the investment in
money and manpower to be made
over that period of time is im-
mense, Nor are the Soviet scien-
tists content with the.speed at
which trees grow. Genetecists
have begun working on the bi-
zarre notion of artificially speed-
ing the growth of certain types of
trees in the temperate zone. :
e t

One part of the problem facing
the Ukraine is of the absence of
any important bodies of water ex-
cept occasional rivers. As part of

oodweek of Koepenick

the Oder-Spres canal and one in
the Schmoekwitz forest. The dead
bodies were horribly mutilated
and, at the mere sight of

one, the hair of Skiper Dohnke’s

wife turned gray. Altogether, 91.
political prisoners were murder-

ed and over 400 tortured in the

Koepenick raid. Many died later

from injuries sustained, or re- °
mained crippled to the end of

‘their lives. :

It is revealing to recall that the.
crime took place four months
after Goering’s gangsters had set

fire to the Reichstag building,

and three months after the Social-
Democratic leaders had endorsed
Hitler’s foreign policy—still con-
tinuing their policy of war
against the left and peace with
fascism. | fe :
Trial of the Koepenick crimin-
als began in Berlin on June 5,

held the attention of the German |

public for six weeks.

the program for the remaking of
nature, they are going to dot the

, Ukraine with 45,000 lakes and

ponds to collect runoff water,

The Ukraine does get snow.
You can preserve snow if you
work with it carefully. You can
preserve its water for the soil in
many ways more easily than you
can preserve rain water, If you
have trees to prevent the water
from running off suddenly, if you
have ponds in which to accumu-
late this runoff water, then you
have water for your soil.

In planning this project, the
planners have taken into account
the fact that the most readily
available large source of water
for the eastern part of the area
that is drying out, the Volga
River, could not be used for irri-
gation. If they took the water out
of the Volga to irrigate the farms,

The indictment ' re-

350-page

corded not only matters of the

past. Of 61 accused, 27 had to be
tried in absentia because they are

now enjoying protection in West
Germany, . :

Had they been present at the
trial they would have had to face
the witness Eichler, whom they
beat till he was crippled and deaf,
and who, 17 years later, had to he
carried into court on a stretcher.
Or the former Koepenick Social
Democrat party chairman, Erwin
Mante, whom they beat until they
destroyed his eyesight.

_ And: workers in the courtroom

audience wiped tears from their
eyes as Mante related the brutal

kicking he received that night,

17 years ago from the principal
accused, SA Leader Poenzke; how
he was forced to strip, was thrown
on the table, and beaten with
sabres and truncheons until he
collapsed—a blind man for the

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—AUGUST 3, 1950—PAGE 4

_ministration, refused to hand

over the criminals responsible for

the level of the Caspian Sea
would drop.

But the Caspian is. needed for
transportation purposes. More
than ‘half’ of all the oil the Soviet
Union gets out of the ground
comes from a single city, Baku,
en the Caspian.

The oil moves to the center of
the country on tankers, across the
Caspian Sea, and the recent drop
in the level of the Caspian has
“had the effect of leaving the
docks in Baku high and dry and

_ of causing the entry of the Volga
into the Caspian to become too-
shallow for big tankers to pass.
Enormous dredging operations
had to be undertaken, Therefore,
they have to maintain the level
‘of the Caspian Sea, and as a mat-
ter of fact, raiSe it.

e

There is one aspect of Siberian
geography which is in favor of
Soviet planners, and that is that
Siberia is so flat. Its western
third is an area about half as
large as the United States. In an
area of more than a million
Square miles, the greatest hill is
no more than 300 feet high.

That means that if you have a
river flowing northward, and you
bar it by a dam 250 feet high—
and this is the plan—that water
will be forced backward a dis-
tance of 950 miles.

Now obviously, the amount of
water required is tremendous.
What is proposed is to supply
enough water to keep the Cas-
pian from dropping; supply
enough water to transform an-
other salt sea, the Aral, from salt
water into fresh water by flood- (
ing it with an additional three
feet of fresh water, and in addi-
tion to that, to irrigate an area
capable of sustaining 200 million
human beings, as many as there
are in the whole Soviet Union to-
day.

To put it somewhat differently,
the Volga is about a mile wide.
The purpose is to create a new
river about 3000 miles in length
and with 30 percent more carry-
ing capacity than the Volga.

Technically, the whole thing
can be done even without atomic
energy. It has been computed
that with modern graders and
other equipment, the job could be
done in six to eight years’ if
enough machinery and labor were
concentrated on the job.

e!

These in essence are the two
chief plans for the remaking of
nature in. progress in the Soviet
Union at the present time, Idon’t
refer to others that heave already
been executed, like makihg the
Arctic Ocean a through seaway.
That is a job already finished.
Much remains to be accomplished,
but the opening of the Arctic is ;

something that we deemed impos-
sible 20 or 25 years ago, and yet
is a fact of history today.

rest of his life.

But at the very time Mante, the
Social Democrat, at last accused
his torturers, the Social Demo-
cratic leaders in West Germany,
holding key positions in the ad-

tences on the perpetrators of the

his sufferings, —

On July 19, President Ranke of
Berlin City, pronounced just sen- .
tences on the perpetration of the
Koepenick Bloodweek. The 15
Principle accused, ringleaders in
the week of murder, were sen-
tenced to be hanged; 13 received :
life imprisonment, 28 prison sen- /
tences ranging from five to 25
years,

But out of sentences
On nine principal war criminals
who were sentenced to death and
six criminals who were sentenc-
ed to life imprisonment, must be
deferred. They are living com-
fortably in West Germany,