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 tol eda sth 0 VERS SS itt er An outline of the area to be developed. Nature gets : re r a face-lifting The USSR embarks raise a sea’s level, on a 15-year plan #) NE (uaa togones ~ SS Si ‘fo stop winds create a 3000-mile long river a f = ry 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,