LOGGING IN RUSSIA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 October 1943, Page 4

LOGGING IN RUSSIA

GETTING THE TIMBER DOWN IN SPRING TIME EVEN SMALL STEAMER USED GREAT RAFTS ON THE VOLGA . (By Lev Gumilevsky, in “Soviet Wai’ News.”) In spring time myriad tiny streams threading the woods and fields of the Soviet Union are turned overnight into rushing rivers —valuable waterways linking up with Russia’s mightiest streams, the Volga, the Dnieper and the Don, and the great Siberian Yenisei, Lena and Amur. The smaller tributaries are capricious in the extreme, and the water level in them varies considerably. Many of them are real waterways for a matter of a few hours only, and one must have enormous experience, be very observant, and have a fine feeling for nature to be able to use the spring torrents for just those few hours to transport firewood, logs and building timber.

If you put your timber into the water a few hours too soon, it may all get lost among the bushes and gullies: if too late, then the water will fall, and the wood will be stranded far from its destination.

A couple of weeks ago I watched 200 workers turning logs into the River Velya. The spring waters, they said, would carry the timber to the Verbilki railway station. There it would be fished out of the water, dried and loaded on to railway trucks bound for Moscow

The wood is floated down the river for 375 miles. Brigades of workers are stationed at intervals along the banks to direct the wood on its journey. The water is solid with logs. Two hundred streams are carrying timber to the Kama River. There it will be made up into rafts, which will then bo towed to the Volga. Some as far as Astrakhan. Here the rafts will be rebuilt in huge cigar shaped masses and cross the Caspian to Baku. The first experiments in transporting timber across the Caspian were made ten years ago, and were completely successful. Lumbermen relieved the railways of the task of carrying timber to «the Caucasus, and wood ceased to be so precious in Baku and Krasnovodsk.

At this season millions of cubic yards of the most diverse kinds of timber are carried downstream, first as single logs on narrow brooks, which have their sources deep in the pine woods or the Siberian taiga, then along the main waterways in the form of rafts, or on special timber-carrying barges. These barges, loaded to the brim with timber, are built for one trip only. On arrival at their destination they are pulled apart and their timber used for building or firewood. The war has taught the Soviet people to use timber as a substitute for metal and other scarce materials. The defence industry and the front demand colossal amounts of it. The lumbermen have shown considerable ingenuity and resource in meeting these demands. They began building the rafts during the winter, so that the water would lift the rafts as soon as the ice broke up. In pre-war years the timber used to reach the Volga during the second half of June. This year it will arrive at least a month earlier. The first batches are going to Stalingrad to help rebuild the city.

Every team on the river is competing to get its timber to Stalingrad in advance of the rest. The liven lumberjacks on the Kama are in advance of all the others; they were first with their winter work, first to get the timber to the river banks, first to finish building huts for the lumbermen on the rafts and barges, first to get their rafts- ready for floating, first away when the spring and the sun gave the signal.