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AMPLE FUNDS BUILD HOSPITALS, SCHOOLS

By JAMES LEECH
There is a legend in Yakutia
that while flying around the world
bestowing gifts froma great bag of
treasures, God got His fingers

_ Nipped by the cold over Yakutia,

and dropped His bag allowing all
the goodies to spill out on the ter-
Titory of Yakutia.

_ This is an oft-told tale, some-
times prefaced by the remark that
we are, of course, atheists; but
Who can resist such an apt story.
For the Yakut Autonomous

OVviet Socialist Republic is in-
deed a treasure-trove.

That much can be found in any
dry statistical review. The com-
Pounding of the republic’s wealth
1s the result of the socialist sys-
tem, its people, their limitless
Tights and opportunities, their
Inner motivation. These are
things which revealed themselves
tO me when I took the long flight
‘from Moscow to the Yakut capi-
tal, Yakutsk, then south. to the
Baikal-Amur Mainline’s north-
South spur, the little BAM.

In his book, Sibir, Farley:
Mowat relates at some length the
Saga of Yakut diamonds, whose

tee

building, mining and railway boom.

ee

Moving equipment at site of the little BAM railway, south Yakutia.

Autonomous Yakutia is brimming with life

In a recent trip to Soviet Yakutia, Canadian Tribune
editor James Leech travelled to the vast new industrial
development north-east of Lake Baikal, speaking to
people in a variety of jobs. This is the second of a series.

production centre is now the city
of Mirny. He tells how the capital-
ist world embargo both of indust-
rial diamonds and later of
technology for mining and cutting
them, forced Soviet experts to
track down the long-suspected
lode in the Yakut wilds and devise
their own technology.

Today, added to Mirny’s
diamonds, Aldan’s gold and to tin
and other resources already famil-
iar, comes the development of the
giant new steel centre, based on
the new railway, directed from
the new -townsite of Nerungri
among the forested hills of south-
ern Yakutia. The BAM railway
will open timber resources so vast
they can almost renew them-
selves naturally. It will aid the
building of giant power stations
on Siberia’s might rivers, and
open promising copper re-
sources.

Into this massive, exciting fron-

Senet

J. Leech, A. Ovchinnikova and editor O. Yakimov discuss Yakutia’s

SAMARAS

tier construction enterprise
thousands of Soviet workers, the
majority young, have flocked to
work under more difficult con-
ditions than they’ ve ever worked
before.

“I can’t imagine myself not
being here,”’ 20-year-old Leonid
Lokotov, a construction brigade

leader told me‘in the village of ~

Zolotinka, first station in Yakutia
on the northbound little BAM.
“It’s a place where a man fulfills
his ambitions.”’

But before I got my chance to

meet these workers, to sit down {|

with them in the wood structured 8i
canteens and living quarters in vil- &
lages serving the construction 5
work, I received answers to many & .

questions from the chairman of
Yakutia’s Supreme Soviet,
Alexandra Yakovlevna
Ovchinnikova.

She spoke as head of the repub-
lic (since 1963) but also as ‘‘an
ordinary woman, a mother, and

= four times a grandmother.’’ She

had graduated from the history
faculty of Yakutsk University and
before that from the polytechnical

school.

“To answer your question
about where the money goes from
the local enterprises, the local
mining industry, and how’ the
money is shared between the
Russian Federation (of which
Yakutia is a part) and the au-
tonomous republic ...’’.she be-
gan.

I had wanted to know who put
the money in and who got it out,
having in mind Canada’s corpora-
tions and multi-nationals which
need a lot of dollar ‘‘incentive”’
before they do any development
of resources, and then take all the
returns, leaving local people with
nothing.

“Independent of the amount of
money we get from our local
enterprises, we receive all we re-
quest from the centralized bodies
according to the all-union
economic plan. So we get money
to build new hospitals, new
schools, new cinemas, everything
in industry and culture, in the

%

Alexandra Ovchinnikova, government head of the vast Yakut Soviet
Republic, spoke of opportunities for women, youth, Native peoples.

medical field. The amount of
money going out of our local
enterprises doesn’t affect the
development of local life.’’

At this point Oleg Yakimov,
editor of the Communist Party
newspaper, Socialist Industry,
pointed out that the republic’s
executive and legislative bodies
determine ‘‘the direction of the
development of local industries
and local resources.

“Take one example, the south-
ern Yakutian industrial complex,
which you are going to visit. It
was an idea born within the Yakut
legislative and executive body
and then the central authorities
approved the idea and gave it ad-
ditional money ...”’

‘The Supreme Soviet of the
Yakut Autonomous Republic
consists of more than 200 de-
puties,’’ Ovchinnikova con-
tinued. Half of those people are
working class, 45% are women,
17% young people up to 30 years
old. Statistics? Facts of a new
way of life!

“We also have our representa-
tives in the Supreme Soviet of the
USSR in Moscow. Fourteen de-
puties from Yakutia help to de-
cide the affairs of the entire Soviet
Union, and as well they represent
the interests of our republic.

Among them six are women and
two are members of the Young
Communist League.”’

“If you take the whole popula-
tion of the Yakut Republic, every
fourth person is studying. We
have our own state university
with seven faculties (including
medicine) . . . the majority of stu-
dents are girls. We have 20 sec-
ondary: colleges where everyone
can choose whatever vocation
one may wish. We have a unique
institute of space physics, a
permafrost research institute, an
institute of the physico-technical
problems of the north, and more
than half the students are of local
nationality, Yakut, Evenk or
other national minority. Students
from Yakutia also enter Moscow,
Leningrad, Kiev and other insti-
tutes — about 250 each year.”’

It wasn’t unrelated, I thought
as the plane rumbled off into grey
clouds next day, that a Yakut is
head of the diamond mining in-
dustry, another, a women, is head
of the Yakutsk Institute of Litera-
ture and Languages, and that the
Yakut people number many pain-
ters, writers, artists of various
kinds among them. They also
claim some first rate builders as
the new centres in the taiga were
to show me.

Tory convention in Quebec fails
in move to win French-Canadians

QUEBEC CITY — Despite all
the efforts of the Progressive
ONservative Party and the
Urgeois press to present the
Ories as an alternative to the
ankrupt Liberal government,
€ recent biennial convention
€monstrated that the Tories too
are just as bankrupt.
he Tories made a pitch at their
Onvention to win the support of
Tench Canadians by holding
their convention in Quebec City.
The attempt failed. It was the first
me the Tories had held a con-
Yention in the province of Quebec
Ut in the end very few French
anadians bothered to attend the
Stage-managed affair.
© wooing of the French
Canadian vote also fell through
When the flirtation with the

right-wing provincial based
Union Nationale became so
transparent that even the leader of
the Party was embarrassed by the
manoeuvers, and then didn’t
make the expected unity appeal.

As the outgoing president of the
Tories, Michael Meighen, had to
admit:at the close of the conven-
tion, ‘‘We still haven’t solved our
problems in Quebec,”’ referring to
the low popularity of the P.C.’s
there. The Tories had hoped to
win French Canadian support
through their convention because
they realize that if they are to win
a federal election they must have
more support in Quebec. But they
came out of the convention with
the same lack of support with
which they went into it. They
have no provincial wing in the

province of Quebec and hold only
three ridings out of 74. And there
was nothing that came out of the
convention in the way of any pol-
icy changes which would indicate
that things will be any brighter for
them in Quebec.

In addition to the overwhelm-
ing failure to win French Cana-
dian support the convention also
demonstrated that the Tories are
moving still further to the right, in
an effort to protect state-
monopoly capitalism as well as
present themselves as an alterna-
tive to the Liberals in Ottawa.

Evidence of the further shift to
the right came with the election of
Robert Coates as the president of
the Tories. Coates has publicly
expressed his support for the

South African apartheid regime
after taking a trip there with ex-
penses paid by the South African
government. Upon his return
from the expense-paid junket,
Coates wrote a defense of South
Africa and apartheid policy in
general saying, ‘‘The only thing
that will kill change is the con-
tinuous attacks from those in the
free world who should know bet-
ter. The change in South Africa is
not tokenism.”’ On the subject of
Namibia which South Africa has
continued to illegally occupy de-
spite the condemnation of the Un-
ited Nations and declarations by
the International Court of Justice
that their presence there is illegal
Coates said, ‘‘Southwest Africa
(Namibia) is the most refreshing
experiment in Black Africa to-
day.”’

As yet another indication of the
Tories move further to the right
was the presence at the conven-
tion of James Gillies, the presi-
dent of the Tories’ shadow
cabinet and economic advisor to

Tory leader Joe Clark. Gillies’
solution to Canada’s economic
problems go even beyond the
sell-out of the Liberal’s policies of
continentalism and were expres-
sed in a recent speech he made
saying ‘‘There’s nothing dis-
graceful about being a hewer of
wood and drawer of water if that’s
where you have your compara-
tive advantage.’’ Naturally, as
economic adviser to Clark, the
Gillies solution to Canada’s crisis
was reflected in Clark’s state-

ments about ‘‘going back to.

basicss. <<.

The Tory convention in
Quebec City demonstrated
graphically that the PCs are ban-
krupt and cannot present to the
Canadian people an alternative to
the equally bankrupt Liberal gov-
ernment. And it points still more
graphically to the need to imple-
ment the Communist Party of
Canada’s call for a new govern-
ment, with new policies as an
answer to the needs of the Cana-
dian people.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—NOVEMBER 18, 1977—Page 5