RUSSIA LOOKS ABROAD.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 183, 5 July 1937, Page 6

RUSSIA LOOKS ABROAD.

Two cablegrams 'sent from New York at the end of June indicate how Soviet .Russia looks abroad for expert aid in fashioning the State. On June 25 the death was reported of Colonel 11. L. Cooper, the American builder of the famous Dnieprostroi dam and hydroelectric works, and two days later it was stated that concern was being shown over the growing number of Russian aeronautical engineers and mechanics sent to key plants in America to learn the aviation industry. As the Soviet is buying American aeroplanes it has imposed the condition that the methods of the companies will be explained to its men; but considered opinion is that a valuable advantage is being given away. This may be accepted as another example of Russian shrewdness, though its effect on the American companies may be of little account in the end. It was the same instinct that made the Russian authorities look abroad for a man who would build for them a giant hydro-electric works on the Dnieper rapids. Its official opening a lew years ago marked the completion of one of the most ambitious projects of the first Five-Year-iTan and of. at that time, the largest hydro-electric undertaking m the world. It was a dictum of Lenin that “Socialism is the Soviet power plus electrification,” and an almost mystical faith in electricity noticeable in modern Russia in part accounted for the spectacular dimensions of the Dnieprostroi scheme. It was designed to generate 756,000 horsepower —as against the 620,000 at Muscle Shoals in the United States, and Niagara’s 430,000 — with an output of 3,000,000 kilowatts a year, sufficient to serve 70,000 square miles and a population of 16,000,000. Yet when the vast undertaking was completed the potential consumers in the Dnieprostroi area numbered not more than a million, lint the region has been developed industrially and by 1932 some 500 million roubles had been spent on new plant. To harness the rapids of the Dnieper was not a new proposal ; far reaching plans were made in the reign of the late Czar, and even before then, but all were abandoned because the region, which consists of thinly populated arid steppes, seemed unsuited for intensive agricultural or industrial development. An authority on hydro-electrical works has declared that “Dnieprostroi is an imposing achievement; and, indeed, Dnieprostroi apart, the Bolsheviks have achieved remarkable things in the domain of electrification. All the same the foreign observer cannot avoid the impression that the work has been less thriftily done than in countries where a free economy prevails.” The latter comment is true of the Tages station which supplies Tiflis with electricity. It cost 16 million roubles instead of an estimated three million, and the electricity could have been generated much more cheaply by using petrol from the neighbouring oil-wells of Baku. For Colonel Cooper, who was not concerned with its future economic success, Dnieprostroi was an impressive triumph and a monument to his genius as an .hydraulic engineer.