Problems of a New Town [antikvár]

Mention of the industrial development of new territories in the USSR usually conjures up a mentái image of Siberia, the Far East, and the Far North. Yet one of the most striking newly developed areas is a one-and-a-half-hours flight from Moscow, on the lower reaches of the Kama, the main tributary of the river Volga. Until recently this region situated in the Tatar Autonomous Republic, close to large industrial centres, has been a kind of "industrial vacuum"-an area of two and a half thousand square kilometres with virtually no major industrial facilities. Yet there were factors that suggested the practicability of building an industrial complex of unprecedented size here. In the vicinity lie Tataria's oilfields yielding approximately 100 millión tons of petróleum a year. A temperate climate and comparatively even terrain made it possible to develop the area without the extra expenditure required by many other developing areas. Transport links-railways, roads, navigable rivers, and air lines-already existed. And the main consumers of future products as weil as the suppliers of equipment and raw materials were not too far by Soviet standards-just a few hundred kilometres away. The area which hitherto had chiefly specialised in farming would be able to supply a considerable number of workers in the