Free Sibir by Farley Mowat

every year but we could easily use millions more.
    “When they planned Shelekhov they could only get a few hundred technicians and trained people, so the Party sent out letters to all the Komsomol groups [Young Communist League] asking for volunteers who would help build the plant and the town. That was in 1959. I was eighteen then, and a student at Kharkov in the Ukraine. The idea of going to far away Siberia was exciting. It would be a new thing, I thought; an adventure, and something worthwhile doing, too.
    “There were nine hundred and five of us volunteers who started the work here. Few were older than nineteen and most were even younger than that. There were no professionals amongst us, and hardly any had special skills. We lived in tents pitched in the taiga and the first winter was rather dreadful. Sometimes it was forty-five degrees below zero. We kept the tents warm somehow, and we kept ourselves warm working, because clearing and preparing the construction site went on all winter.We learned skills as we needed them. Boys and girls worked at the same jobs and the girls worked just as hard as the boys.
    “In the spring we began getting new crowds of Komsomol youngsters and things looked up. We built log barracks and that was the end of the tents. A few people got fed up with the summer heat, the flies, the winter frosts and the hard work, and went home; but others came out to take their places.
    “By 1961 the factory buildings were nearly finished and there were several apartment blocks and stores and theatres and things in the new town. That autumn the first electric furnace was started up in the plant.
    “The job of the Komsomol youth was really over then, but the new city had become our home without our realizing what was happening. It was the biggest and perhaps the best thing most of us will ever do in our lifetimes. We had done it together and we didn’t want to let it go.
    “New workers were arriving and we were jealous of the newcomers. After all we had built the place, and so we decided we would stay and run it too.
    “So that is how it is, you see? We are Siberians now. We belong to Shelekhov and it to us. No regrets about it either! Although there
is
one thing I sometimes wish … now that we have everything for comfort, sometimes I wish I could do it all again.… I really envy the kids who are coming out to Siberia to start building their own cities, like Ust’Illim, and in the far north. They’ve got a great job ahead of them.…”
    Luba did not add much to my knowledge of aluminum production in Siberia although, like most Russians, she could probably have reeled off yards of imposing statistics if I had asked for them; but she did provide further confirmation for the existence of a phenomenon which seems to have escaped the notice of professional observers both inside and outside Russia.
    While grudgingly admitting to the speed and scope ofdevelopments in Siberia, most western observers assume that this fantastic efflorescence occurred primarily because Russia is a totalitarian state with absolute power to enforce compliance to its will. Setting aside the new technological capabilities common to both east and west, the experts conclude that the trick has been made possible by the manipulation and exploitation of servile labour. On the other hand the mandarins in the Kremlin seem to believe (or at least to want us to believe) that the Siberian transfiguration is entirely due to the righteousness of communist doctrine, and its ability to spur its believers to the accomplishments of prodigious feats.
    Neither conclusion is correct. The massive surge of human energy and effort which is transforming Siberia is substantially a phenomenon of freedom seeking. Before the Second World War, and for some years after it, a major attempt
was
made to develop Siberia by the use of forced labour – and the results were minimal. It was
after
the virtual abolition of labour camps that the Sleeping Giant