Evening Star Newspaper, January 3, 1932, Page 73

e AMERICAN THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C., JANUARY 3, 1932 COLONY IN — HEART OF SIBERIA Working for the Soviet in a frontier village thousands of miles from home. The American engineers of the Kuznetskstroy works, photographed with their wives in front of the “American Hotel” in the Siberian town. BY RUTH KENNELL. KUZNETSKSTROY, SIBERIA. T least for the present, the maore the Russian people build, the harder life becomes for them. Up go the steel frames of the big furnaces and coke ovens, while the workers who build them burrew into the earth for rude shelter, their clothing in rags, their rations black bread and petatoes, and sometimes dried or salted fish. Six years 2go the people led almost a pastoral, sometimes even a nomad, existence. Today Siberia is a Soviet frontier, where the dugout, as in frontier days in America has become the common type of dwelling, the guickest method of giving shelter to hundreds of thousands of new industrial workers who pour in frem every section of the Soviet Union. In Kuznetskstroy, where a vast new metal- lurgical plant is ariing en the Siberian plain, these dugouts fascinated me more than the giant new construction—the blast furnaces which the American engineers call “The Mad- house,” where there is an uproar of riveting, hammering, welding, powerful hoists swinging heavy burdens through the air, engines rush- ing unheedingly back and forth on the net- work of tracks, workers climbing recklessly under moving cars, horses and wagons thread- ing their way through mazes of pipes, piles of iron and rubbish. And above all this chaos the lofty iron sides of the ovens, the fantastic outlines of the blast furnaces rise. To the right stand the almost completed coke ovens, the first battery already fired, to the left siretch the open hearth and steel skeletons of the rolling mills, The axis of the works runs north and south, with the Altaii Mountains to the southeast and the Tom River flowing into the Arctic. MAGNIFICENT site, this, from the point of view of raw material as well as dis- tribution, for the giant metallurgical plant, an important link in the Kuzbas-Ural Ccmbine, whose chief task will be to supply rails But it is a barren spot from an esthetic point of view. There is none of the natural beauty of Kecmerovo, also on the Tom River Here there are no trees, only one small grove of silver birch, ncw turning yellow. On its edge stands the common grave and the wooden, futuristic monument in black and red to the 22 who lost their lives the day I arrived when a scaffolding over the coke oven silos collapsed bcneath the weight of 100 workers who were holding a spectacular “pep” meeting on top. D-wn they went, 500 feet below, into the bottom of tbe concrete silo, and a hole had to be torn through the thick wall to pull them out, 22 already dead, many ter- ribly injured and suffocating. An unnecessary tragedy, due to the careless- ness of the assistant chief of constructicn who had called the meeting and was the first to go down to his death Building a metallurgical plant in the wilds of Siberia is no child’s play. More than 150 workers have lost their lives since the con- struction started two years ago. 1" THE Russians are so careless,” a young American engineer told me, “it’'s & mar- vel to me more of them are not killed. Hardly a day passes that I don't pull some fool from under a moving train.” The -Freyn Engineering Co. of Chicago, in charge of construction at Kuznetskstroy, has lost one of its men, too. Hill, already som-°- what of a legendary hero among the 42 Americans, was chief rigger, T charge of hoist- ing, and, according to his comrades, a reck- less, happy-go-lucky fellow “I heard him singing ‘Dixie’ as he passed my door that very noon,” one of the young engineers told me, as we sat in the social hall of the American Hotel,” where live Freyn men who left their wives back home. It is a large, two-story log house, with steam heat, Supervising Construction of a Huge Industrial City, American Workers Lead a Frontier Life De Luxe, Bossing 15,000 Soviet Shock Troops and 30,000 Exiled Landowners Who Are Forced to Live in Dugouts. W here Soviet Russia prepares for the Machine Age. The steel skeletons of the new rolling mills, under construction in Kuznetskstroy. hot water on tap, baths, and a dining room serving excellent meals, as nearly American style as the conscientious Russian cook can make them. “That fellow, Hill, didn't knew what fear meant. A young giant, walking coolly be- neath swinging hoists, along high walls and scaffolding—and that's what killed him at last. “He was standing under the loaded hoist, giving orders. The operator evidently mis- understood his direction and droepped the load squarely on him—it took about 500 tons of steel to do for him, and even then he lived for several hours. “One of our other engineers- was in the hospital after a serious operation and when they carried Hill into the ward en a stretcher, he called: ‘Hello, Glenn, I had to get myself pretty nearly killed so I could come to see you.” His interpreter sat at his side. “‘Well, kid,' said Hill, ‘you've sure been faithful;, you've followed me wherever I went —but now I'm going where you can't follow me.” He smoked his last cigarette, and left us.” TH_E Freyn engineers are a fine, sturdy lot of Americans, accustomed to roughing it, conscientious in their work and thrilled by its vastness—according to their senior engineer, Everhard, most of them have never been up against things on such a big scale before—and appreciative of their special favors. It is frontier life de luxe for them. Forming less than one-fourth of the foreign workers and specialists in the works, they live entirely separately, the single men in the “American Hotel,” and the married couples in cozy three and four room apartments with fireplaces in log houses nearby. Three-fourths of their salary is paid into the home bank in dollars, and one-fourth oen the spot in Soviet currency, a sum more than ade- quate to meet their living expenses. Several men are from Columbus, Ohio, indudin_g Ogden, senior construction engineer of the big refractories plant, and his young partner, Gibson. The social hall on the second floor of the “hotel” is always cozy and warm. Many of the men, in spite of the excellent fare, carry sup- plementar, food into the dining room with them—on the senior engineer's small side table stands a package of American breakfast faod and a can of American coffee, tea being the beverage served at all meals. On the lower floor is the American store, stocked with the best the government has to eoffer. HF.RE, as in Moscow, the Americans are the aristocracy of Soviet society. The restau- rants for foreigners and for Russians are graded according to the social classes. First, and best, the American, charging 150 rubles a month for three meals daily; foreign restaurant where Germans, Prench and many privileged Russians eat, 105 rubles; higher technical restaurant for engineers and techni- cians, a la carte; technical restaurant for fore- men, office workers, petty officials, a la carte; “better” restaurant for all who can pay more, ranging from 45 to 75 kopeks a meal; several workers’ restaurants located at the plants, with special sections for the privileged udarniki (shock brigadiers) distinguished by tablecloths, napkins, flowers and prompt service, 35 te 45 kopeks, and dietary sections where workers om doctors’ orders can eat. Ninety-five per cent of the 45,000 workers eat in restaurants, and about 6 per cent of their families carry food prepared in restaurants home, families not being permitted to eat in restaurants. Kuznetskstroy is said to be better provisioned than almost any industrial center in the Soviet Union, and ccmmunal feeding has developed here far ahead of Moscow and other large cities. It is in many ways like a great army camp; for example, liquor is prohibited to be sold within its environs—but bootleggers, usu- ally shrewd peasant women, bring liquor from old Kuznetsk, across the river, where there 1s a government distillery, and sell at high prices to the workers. Efforts to break this up do not always succeed. Underneath all of this is the general sordid- ness of mass life. In the Fall season, with chill rain and deep mud and filth underfoot, and almost no street work, an epidemic of typhoid fever is spreading. This brimgs me back to the dugout, symbol of frontier life. On the slope above the American houses, they sprang up like mushrooms in the rain. I climb up and thread my way among .them, camera in hand. 1Is it because I was born in a sod house on the Oklahoma frontier that I am drawn by these hovels? There is something cozy and picturesque about them, each a different style; here is one built like a nest, a woven birch bough basket encasing the sod walls; another is entirely of sod, with wooden door and window frames and roof; several are of white plaster on the out- side and look quite attractive. Inside, if one family is allowed a roomt te itself, these dugouts are quite cozy and clean. There is a board floor, well scrubbed, a table, stools, curtains at the small-paned windows, a brick stove covered with plaster and white- washed, an icon or picture of Lenin in the corner. ERHAPS the most depressing sight was the “emigrant” settlement across the river, There are said to be 30,000 exiled kulaks—as the independent, prosperous peasants are called—in the colony, counting women and children, 10,000 working in Kuznetskstroy, on wages and rations like the rest. They have been recruited from “Stbulon,” the great prison nearby, a special concentration camp for kulaks. A kulak is regarded as a class enemy, inher- ently opposed to collectivization, and the Russian poor and middle peasants believe that the only good kulak is either a dead or an exiled one. So they are shipped in freight cars across the vast stretches to far-away Siberia, and thea turned loose either with plots of ground te till, or to work in incustry. After a probation period of two years, citizenship rights may be restored to them. As we drove along the country road which wound over low hills, we met processions of people trudging stolidly. “It's Sunday, perhaps they have been to the bazaar in Kuznetsk, we thought. But when we reached the old white church with its towers and small green cupolas, thz iong-haired priest met us at the door. : “You are just too late, the service is over,” he said.