RALPH PARKER reports from Siberia

It's a bumper crop
in the Soviet Union

[NX the boundless depth of Cen-
tral Asia and the rolling plains
of Siberia, tens of thousands of
combine harvesters are working
day and night to bring in the
greatest wheat crop the Soviet
Union has ever had.

At the controls are young men
and women who came to these
parts to wpturn millions of acrés
of virgin soil in response to their
country’s call for a new upsurge
in agriculture.

They travelled 3,000 miles to
reach the main centre of this
great new effort:

For two weeks I have been
from farm to farm in the foot-
hills of the Altai Mountains,
Siberia’s southern border with:
China.

At new machine and tractor

some 30 million more acres
will be ploughed up and sown,
and hundreds of new. state
farms formed.”

These official claims I found to
be tully borne out by the evi
dence of iny own eyes and ears.

*

The Land of the Soviets col-
lective farm at the very ‘south-
western corner of Siberia is typi-
eal.

This 35,000-acre farm, which ‘s
run by a 49-year-old woman, ts
selling to the government 3,000
tons of wheat over and above the
amount it is delivering in pay-
rent for the services of the
machine-and-tractor station.

By doing so, it is benefiting
from the new higher prices paid

stations and state farms, along
the Turk-Sib Railway, on 25,000-
acre collective farms whose fields
stretched to the edge of the salty
deserts of Kazakhstan, every-
where I saw a bumper harvest
crowning the efforts of men and
women that began last winter
with the great flow of volunteers
from the cities.

In Barnaul, centre of a region
that is the richest source of wheat
in the Russian Federation, a lead-
ing overseer told me that a har-
vest of nearly seven million tons’
of wheat could be expected, and
here in Alma Ata, Nurtas Undas-
inov, president of Kazakhstan,
said in an interview: .

“The 94 new state farms
formed this year to cultivate
virgin soil are not only helping
to plough some 16. million
acres of virgin soil.

“They have grown enough
grain to meet all the seed re-
quirements next year, when

This year the Rostselmash plant at Rostov has sent thousands
of combines, five-furrow gang ploughs and self-propelled mowers to
the reclaimed virgin lands of Altai and Kazakhstan. The main con-
veyer in the plant’s harvester combine department is shown here.

this year to farms to the tune of
some four million roubles.

Admittedly, last year’s harvest
on this farm was spoiled by
drought, but the 1954 crop, 11
times that of last year’s is not
to be explained by the weather
alone.

Four thousand acres of land.

previously used as_ low-grade
pasture have been added to the
land under grain; a new machine-
and-tractor station run by a 27-
year-old engineer, who volunteer-
ec from the town, has been built
nearby; qualified agriculturists
have come to work permanently
on the farm. ‘

Enthusiastic young workers,
first-rate new agricultural mach-
inery and the application of the
latest scientific methods — here
lies the secret of the long col-
umns of lorries, horse-drawn
wagons and camel: trains that 1
watched bringing the yolden

grain to the silos beside the Turk-
Sib railway.

Sixty thousand young men and
women, many of them trained
engineers, have gone on the land

in the Altai region of Siberia, and
over 100,600 in Kazakhstan.

This is no seasonal flow of
labor. These townsfolk have
come from all over the Soviet
Union to establish new homes in
the country. They are building
new urban-type settlements on
all the state farms.

And although conditions this
spring and summer were excep-
tionally hard for the newcomers
and although no one is under
eny obligation to stay, the num-
ber who have asked to leave is
infinitestimal.

The Siberia that these volun-
teers came to is not the. grim
Siberia of legend.

Of that land, only the memory
remains in the minds of old men
and women I met, who told me
of the tragic disillusionment of
peasants who left the famine-
stricken region of the Ukraine to
start new lives—and found wood-
en ploughs or the lead mines
waiting for them.

The Siberia I found was a land
of beautiful new towns and mod-
ern factories, receiving power
from the harnessed energy of
the rivers that rush down from
the roof of the world.

It is a land whose railways and
mineral reserves are being rapid-
ly developed and on whose fields
are working the very latest mach-
ines that are demonstrated at ihe
agricultural exhibition in Mos-
cow.

. I found people working with
no restrictions on their move-
ments, free to come or to leave
Siberia, given every opportunity
to study, to develop their cul-
tural interests, even in a most
remote field camp.

Here, as the neighboring Kaz-
akhstan, the effort made and the
hardships overcome this year are

now receiving a bountiful re-

ward.

The deep snow that was about
all the volunteers found when
they pitched their tents in the
steppe last March, gave the soil
a good moisture content. There
was no drought and, although the
harvest began late, there are
abundant combine harvesters,
grain driers and trucks to take
up the crop quickly.

And before the harsh Siberian
winter sets in, millions more
acres of soil will have been
ploughed for the first time, for
next spring’s sowing. ©

HE women engineers of Brit-
ain intend to keep “the
purposeful curves nature de-
signed” in spite of anything
Christian Dior may design.
That is, t they follow the
advice of the Amalgamated
Engineering Union’s new wo-
men’s journel Woman’‘s Angle,
which is up in arms this month
in defense of feminine curves.
“We live in a world beset

These engineers will keep to curves

by many dangers, totalitarian
dictatorship, global warfare,
atomic annihilation — and M.
Dior, alk of them obsesssed by
the same urge, to either de-
humanise or extinguish hu-

manity,” writes the journal’s
beauty columnist, Betty Ann.

She accuses Dior of trying
“to deprive us of that most
charming and tender attribute

of womanliness, the maternal
bosom,” and suggests that such
efforts are “morbid.”

“Tf he succeeds in this at-
tack upon our sex — and he
may if the garment industry
mass produces his styles —
then we can assume that men
re tired of womanliness and
in that case are in a serious
psychological condition.”

Thousands of combines working day and _ night.

And every opportunity to develop cultural interests.
PACIFIC TRIBUNE — SEPTEMBER 17, 1954 — PAGE 10