MUSHROOM GROWTH

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 288, 30 July 1932, Page 2

MUSHROOM GROWTH

REMARKABLE PROGRESS OF INDUSTRY IN SOVIET RUSSIA. TOWNS SPRING UP. LONDON, June 15. Great industrial centres springing up like mushrooms, where formerly were hamlets constitute one of the striking visible results of the five-year plan, reports the Moscow correspondent of tha Manchester Guardian. One of the most notable is ht Khib- i: inagorsk, within the Arctic circle, where only 100 people lived in 1929. Now there are 40000. Stalinabad, formerly a village near the Afghanistan frontier, and now the capital of the Republic of Tadjikistan, has a population of 60,000. The most impressive mushroom city is Magnitogorsk, where the largest steel plant in Europe is being constr'ucted and is yielding the first pigiron. An obscure village in 1929. it has now a population approaching 200,000. Coal Basin. Kuznetzk, in the coal basin of Central Siberia, shows the greatest regional development. It has four rapidly-growing towns. Stalinsk has 150,000 people, with a steel plant using Magnitogarsk ore; Prokopievsk, thfe population of which was 10,000 in 1926, now has 100,000 Kemerovno is growing similarly. Sudzhensk leaped from a village before the revolution to a centre with 50,000 inhabitants today. Another 100,000 city has grown around Dnieprstron, with its hydroelectric plant and with steel and aluminium industries; while the centre of Arctic development is Port Igarka, at the mouth of the Yenisei. These industrial towns are in various stages of transition and generally are short of everything, from vegetables to housing and sanitation. Many are situated in bleak and unprepossessing localities. Taken together, with their colossal shift of population, they are comparable only to the early growth of English industrial towns and the settlement of America west of the Mississippi.