IN THE URALS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 6, 21 January 1942, Page 8

IN THE URALS

RUSSIA'S INDUSTRIES NEW PRODUCTION RECORDS Figures showing the Soviet Union's industrial strength in the cast are given by a correspondent of Soviet War News in Sverdlovsk, who points out that the eastern iron and steel industry is centred in the Urals which have established new production records since Germany entered the war against Russia. About 87 per cent of the lead, most of the zinc and nickel, and nearly 96.5 per cent of the copper extracted in Russia are obtained in the Urals and the adjacent Kazakhstan district (he writes). The bulk of the country's gold, platinum, tin, tungsten, antimony and other rare metals are mined in the Soviet East, and here, too, large aluminium and Qiilnlmr industries hnvo been estab-

SUipilUr lllUUSinei iiuvc uwli caiaw- m lished. Magnesium is also produced. All asbestos and potassium consumed in the Sosviet Union comes from the Urals. The Urals to-iday arc the centre of the Eastern iron and steel industry. Whereas in 1929 8,000,000 tons of iron ore was produced in the country, by the end of the second Fivpyear Plan in 1937, as much as 8,200000 tons was mined in the Soviet East alone. The succeeding four years of the third Five-year Plan saw the rapid growth in the extraction of iron ore in the East. The prospected iron ore reserves in the Soviet East are sufficient to answer the needs of the entire national economy, the correspondent adds. Untold riches are contained in Magnitnaya Mountain, and the Vysokaya and Clagodat mountains also contain big reserves of high quality iron ores. Ten years ago it was generally believed that the section of Western Siberia adjoining the Urals was without deposits. Soviet geologists, however, have proved that the Gornaya Shoria district, Novosibirsk region, contains" huge deposits of ore, so that the Siberian iron and steel industry, which hitherto used Ural ores, can now work with its own deposits. MnHpirn 'Plants

Modern flants The large plants of the Urals, the hulk of which have been built -in the past ten years, are scattered over a vast area. Chief among them are the Magnitogorsk and Stalinsk plants which rank among the -world's biggest iron and steel works. In 1987, the last year of the second five-year plan, the Soviet East, the Urals, Siberia and the Volga region—produe- . Ed 6.300,000 tons of steel, more than the country's total output at the end of the. first five-year plan. A plant producing ferro-alloys, the largest in the countrj", has been erected south of the Urals. In the Urals iron and steel enterprises new production records have been reported since l the outbreak of war. Large deposits of coal, sufficient to answer the requirements cif this iron and steel industry, are also to be found in the Soviet East. The output of coal in the 1 Soviet East i had already reached 41,000,000 tons in 1937, more than the country's total output in 1929 and almost as much as was produced in the Donetz .Basin in 1933. The Soviet East also has its own oil industry, which, in 1938 gave 5,500,000 tons of oil, nearly three times the total output of synthetic oil in Germany and larger than the output in Iraq.