 The National Broadcasting Company at its affiliated stations present the Pacific story. This is the story of the Pacific, the drama of the millions of people who live around this greatest sea, where the United States is now committed to a long-term policy of keeping the peace. This, as another public service of the National Broadcasting Company, is the background story of the events in the Pacific and their meaning to us and to the generations to come. Tonight, because of the growing interest in Russia on the Pacific, we repeat the story of Siberia's people. Siberia's people, the secret of her strength. That man came out here from Leningrad. Lithuanian, the Mime Director, pointed to a blonde Russian. And that man down there came from the Ukraine. From the grain fields of the Ukraine to here in Siberia. And that man over there came from the Donetsk Basin. He came out here to teach these Yakutsks here how to mine the modern machine. 500 miles inland from the Sea of Okutsk in the region of Yakutsk, men from all over the USSR are working alongside the native Yakutsks, the slant-eyed Asiatics, who for centuries have trapped and traded in this frozen wilderness. The European Russians work with them with zeal and enterprise. Those Russians came out here to Soviet Russia not in chains as I came 40 years ago. They came out here because they wished to come. Ziponian had come to Siberia as an exile. 20 million Russians came out here to Soviet Asia in the first year after Hitler attacked us in 1941. 20 million in the first year. More have come since. The slow migration to Siberia, which had begun long ago as a mere trickle, had overnight turned into a flood. The European Russians came bag and baggage to work out their destiny with the Yakutsks, the Tunguses, the Lopare, the Koryaks, the Gylyaks, the Samoyed. The hardships of Siberia tempered and toughened them, made them strong and resourceful. They mixed with these people and with the pioneers, and with the descendants of the exiles who have been sent out here in the days of the tsars. Today, Soviet Asia is humming with activity, but it is not the blast furnaces, nor the mines, nor the aircraft factories, nor the steel mills that make Soviet Asia strong. It is the people. The people made the city's rise out of the wilderness. First came the trappers and the firm merchants. They penetrated across the thousands of miles of Siberian wilderness, even across the bearing straits down into Alaska. Then came the Kossaks, who were given large parcels of land on the frontiers in return for military service. Then the exiles. Ah, another one. Poor, miserable wretch. Come in. Come in. Zoponyin was 26 when he was arrested in Moscow and locked up in the house of preliminary detention. What are you here for? They did not tell me. They just came to my quarters and took me and brought me here to be served. What is your name? What is your business? My name is Zoponyin. I'm a writer. You're written against the government? I have written for a newspaper in Paris about our national affairs. Why are you here? I do not know. I'm a chemist. And you? I am a professor of history. They had no warrant for my arrest? Nothing. They just took me. Didn't they say why they were taking you? Only that my presence was prejudicial to public order. Yes. They said my presence was incompatible with public tranquility. They did not even give me a chance to let my people know what had happened to me. I must get in touch with my people or my friends. Do you want the same thing to happen to them? Can I do nothing? Am I simply to stay here in this cell until I'm tried? You will not be tried. You will not even have a hearing. How long have you been here? 15 months, almost 16. And I've been here a year. How long will they keep me locked up here? Last week, a girl who had been locked up in this place for two years went insane. Then they took her out. And the young woman who had been here for only two months was sentenced to 20 years in the mines of Cara. Cara? Yes, to Siberia. And you remember Bukharin? The journalist? Yes. They held him here for 18 months in solitary confinement. He is that he's thrown to the peace of glass. Does no one escape? More die or kill themselves. If they never escape, sit down, Zabonion. Do not be impassive. By a personal use case of Bukharin, Zabonion was sentenced to exile in Siberia. And with him, the professor and the chemist. Their destination, Yakutsk. Chained together, the convicts started their long march to Siberia. Among them were physicians and merchants, a nobleman and a bootmaker, an author and three students, and a Caucasian princess, two government officials, the daughter of the leader of a forbidden society, a lawyer, a geologist and a baker. Slowly, they trudged over the long, long exile road into Siberia. It is getting dark. We cannot stop until we reach there. The village is not even in sight. Over this road, many prisoners had gone before, covering about 18 miles a day. And arriving at the end of each day's march are the etopies of Variks at the edge of a village. There, there it is. Yes. There at the peak wooden wall around us. Hurry, hurry. We will not get a bench. There was not space for all in the etopies. The lucky ones got benches to sleep on. Every third day, they rested. Then they marched again. This is Chelyabinsk. There is the railway station that everyone talks about. And there is the heated prison. This is Omsk. This is where Dostoevsky, the old probably exiled back in 1850. This is Novorossibeersk. We are only halfway to our destination. This is Yenisei province. It was in this province, the Chichenskoye, with the brilliant lawyer Vladimir Ilych Lenin in his exile. This is Krasnoyarsky. We are now about 3,000 miles from St. Petersburg. And just out of here, at Minyushinsky's wear print, Alexander Kropotkin, Martin Yavl, an after-release for exile. Yerkutsk. From here we must go by sledge with dogs for reindeer. Nershinsky. We are only a thousand miles from Yakutsk. Yakutsk, Yakutsk. We are at the end of our march. This is our place of exile. Yerkutsk on the Lena River, almost as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska, was called the People's Prison. It was a village of dreary log huts on the wilderness. Here Alexander Pushkin, the great Russian writer, and many other notables had been exiled. Zyponian and others among the exiles learned the language of the Yerkutsk and made friends of them. You are not like the police chief. No, we do not believe in the same thing. You'd less the same? These are the only clothes we have. The police chief and the officials of the Tsarist government cheat us. They do? We work all season to catch Irmine and Sable and Mink and Squirrel and Martin. Then the tax collectors come and take all we have and give us cheap calico and poor vodka and worthless glass bottles. How often do they come? Two and sometimes three times a year. Everything we do is for them. Can you help us? Yakutsk was a thousand miles from a railroad. In the summer, boats moved up the Lena River to the village and in the winter the frozen river was used as a road. The main traffic was in furs but gradually the talents of the exiles found other things in this wilderness. Strange words were spoken that the Yakutsk scarcely understood. Gold they knew was in the land but silver and copper and lead and nickel, these were little known. The Pawnian studied them. Today I went exploring in the Lena River basin around Yakutsk. I collected some interesting specimens. Some of them are beads of ore which show what reaches the biden this soil. And some tell the story of this country. The story of the ages that have gone before and the peoples who have lived here. These little journeys of exploration are all that relieve the horror of this unbearable loneliness. The exiles studied the plants and the geology. They studied the people and their customs. They studied the needs of this great new country and what they saw and learned they put down on paper. Tuberculosis and syphilis are the scourges of Yakutsk. There is no adequate way to deal with them. The weather is dreary and forbidding which increases the suffering from these and the other diseases. As for events, almost nothing happens. We eagerly await the arrival of new convicts so that we may get some word of the outside world. When we have consumed all the news they bring we settle back once more into futility. There is no hope. Nothing but the day-to-day struggle to keep alive. What the exiles suffered in Yakutsk they suffered in burying degrees in other prison outposts in Siberia. In their shinsk and cara they worked in their mines hewing out the frozen soil. In Shelyabinsk, in Petrovsk, in Minnesinsk they endured the bitterness of the Siberian exile but they came to understand the value of this great frozen country and what it could mean to an enterprising government. The revolution swept through the land from European Russia across the thousands of miles of wilderness to Yakutsk to Vladivostok, to the shores of the Pacific revolution and counter-revolution. To the exiles in Siberia who had been isolated principally because they were against the government of Imperial Russia it meant a new and brighter day had dawned. Their chains were broken. Violent conflict raged in Soviet Asia one faction against another and the Soviets against the Japanese who had landed in the maritime province with some 70,000 men. At last in the early 20s the Japanese were gone and the Soviets set about putting their house in order. European Russians started migrating eastward. They are coming by the hundreds of thousands. Now we can develop our industries out here. Our industries, yes, but we must have more farmers. We must develop our industries to make the weapons to defend Soviet Asia. Yes, but unless we have enough food we can have no industries. Siberia is rich in gold and turds and timber and we have our great resources yet untouched but all these we can lose if we are not able to feed the hundreds of thousands who are coming out here. Along with our industrial development we must have a great agricultural development. By 1930 there was a moderate migration into Soviet Asia. Suddenly the settlement of Soviet Asia became an immediate necessity. The Japanese had created an incident at Mukden and were invading and occupying all Manchuria across the river from Soviet Asia. Soviet Asia must be converted into a fortress to withstand both onslaught and siege. There is everything in Soviet Asia to make it strong. We must develop these resources, build cities, railroads, highways. We must construct military installations, air bases, shipyards. We must raise an army whose sole duty it is to defend the Soviet Far East. And we must hear on these planes raise the food to feed them. This meant people, more immigrants. It meant farmers. It meant that experienced farmers from the fields of Europe and Russia must be brought out to Soviet Asia. Their families must be brought out. They must be set up on the land of Siberia with farm equipment and livestock. The government will move me and my family out here? So spoke Russian farmers in the Ukraine. Yes, the decree has been issued by Stalin. All those who migrated to Soviet Asia within the next six months will be given transportation and housing and supply. It will be hard starting from the beginning in that new country. The government will do everything to help you. The government is anxious that you succeed. Farmers left their lands in European Russia and headed eastward. The great plains of Soviet Asia were opened up to agriculture. And meantime, industrial cities were springing up out of the wilderness, growing not by accident at a given point, but growing according to plan at the point where there would be of the most value. The people, the enterprising, far-seeing people of Russia were breaking the ground at a thousand places. Our research experts found these deposits here at Yakutsk. The ponion, the exile, has become the ponion, the mine director. If this is copper, we are mining here. And in this basin, we are also mining silver, and lead, and nickel. Long before the Russian Revolution, the exiles of Yakutsk had known these treasures were in the ground. Now they are being taken out and fashioned into implements and weapons. We are rich as hills, and we are now mining. While modern machinery brings out the valued ore at this place, which in the days of the exiles was no more than a perth trading post, other research experts are probing for other resources and developing other enterprises. This is the state fur farm. I am in charge of it. This Russian came from Europe. This is the headquarters of the trapping collective. I am in charge of it. This Russian also came from Europe. This is the headquarters of the trapping collective. Under the hands of these people, the Siberia of yesterday was transformed, and yet even they could not dream of what lay ahead. By 1941, millions of Russians had migrated to Soviet Asia. As Americans migrated to the Wild West, the Russians migrated to their Wild East. Yet even millions spread out over the vastness of Soviet Asia were not enough. But most important, the pattern had been set. Instead of developing health as scattered according to the whims and enterprise of individuals, Soviet Asia developed according to a great plan. The plan was to make Soviet Asia self-supporting and strong. When Hitler struck, the Russians fell back. Behind the lines in the great Soviet industrial centers, the Russians worked to carry out Stalin's famous scorched earth order. That is the order. For the enemy must not be left a single engine. A single railway car. Not a single pound of grain. Not one gallon of fuel. Now let us get this machinery loaded. Every small piece of it. All right. Up with it. Move it up on the car. Take it up. Entire industrial plants were uprooted in European Russia in the regions endangered by the Nazis. Massive machinery was loaded on trains, and with the machinery were loaded the workers. Everything is loaded on these trains and ready to move eastward. Very well. All right, breakman give the signal. Take it away and it will start loading the next train. Over the railroad that had been so laboriously laid eastward to the Urals and beyond to the great spaces of Soviet Asia, the trains moved heavily laden with the transplanted industry. That was the greatest migration in all the history of man. Russians from every part of the Soviet Europe flooded out here with every train load. And soon you were building new homes and new schools and expanding our mining operations here at the Soviet Union. The Ponyim and the other exiles would learn about this country in the long years before and now with the leaders. Throughout the thousands of miles from the Urals to the Pacific the wilderness team with new activities. We are draining this now so that we can build a shipyard here. To be strategically located so that it has access to steel from the new mills and yet to protect it from attack from the open sea. We are cutting a corridor through this forest. Transportation is essential to this region. And we are cutting the way for a railroad and a highway. We will have this bridge built in the wreck of time. It will link two vital regions and make Soviet Asia stronger both economically and from a military point of view. The dynamite is placed under the logs and ice, but I do not know if this germ can be blasted out. Because the logs and ice are all frozen together? Yes, it is almost one solid mass. Water is flowing deep under it. Yes, but I have never seen such a log jam as this. You are new out here in Siberia. Are all the men clear? Yes, they are waiting for the blast. Set it off. Yes, sir. The logs are going down the river. I did not think it could be done. We do hear what we must do. Against the blizzard and the biting cold of the Siberia winter the millions of western Russians struggled hewing a civilization out of the wilderness. In the scorching heat of the summer they worked fighting fires and mosquitoes, never stopping in their enormous plan of development and construction. Is the ground here all days frozen? The surface tauts out in the summertime. But below the surface the ground is still frozen. There is no drainage, so the water stays on the surface. I scared someone out of it. How long have you been out here, Mr. Disappointed? Well, nearly 40 years. 40 years? We have need of young engineers like you out here. I feel so insignificant. It is like having a whole new world to build. Everything is here to work with, but we must do the building. In another generation, Soviet Asia may have a population as large as that of the United States. I can see it coming. And it will take all the imagination and the work of millions of us to develop Soviet Asia. Millions of European Russians and workers and farmers poured into Soviet Asia. Before the war, I belonged to the special Red Banner Far Eastern Army. I left Western Russia and joined the Far Eastern Army for duty in Soviet Asia because the pay was higher. When I had finished my service in the Far East, they encouraged me to stay there. If you wish to go into a profession out here, the government will pay you a bonus. But I am a farmer. The government will subsidize you until you are well established. Then you will be permitted to sell your crops in the open market. Great numbers of Red Army men from Western Russia settled in Siberia. They worked for the development of Soviet Asia, and periodically they reported for training. Boomtowns rose in the frontier country. Yes, Magnitigorsk is now a great city. Now remember when it was only a village. Today our blast furnaces turn out thousands of pounds of matter each day. The population of Magnitigorsk now runs into the hundreds of thousands. And where the icy wind whistled over the solitude of the lonely village, today there are other sounds. This is Stavlowsk, the most important railroad center in this region. We call it the Soviet Chicago. From here in the Ural, the massive trains roll out to Soviet Asia to the Pacific. But no longer is equipment and produce taken to Soviet Asia. Today Stavlowsk sees the trains bringing to Western Russia the equipment and produce from Soviet Asia. Behind all this fabulous development are the people. The Russians who came out into this new country as exiles ought to escape tyranny and persecution. And the tribes that have been roaming this unbelievable vastness since the Stone Age. The people are harnessing its resources. I am an Uzbek. Our Uzbek Republic is in Central Asia, 3,000 miles from the Pacific. Once we depended on illegal rain that came to our desert to help us grow our fruit and melon in cotton. Now we have built dams and irrigation systems. Now when the sun melts the snow in the mountain far away, the rivers bring the water down to us. In our irrigation systems, water aligns. The water has enabled the Uzbeks to grow more and better cotton. And to handle the cotton, mills and factories have been built. Today in this desert country, an industrial center is growing up. I am a Buryat Mongol. Our Buryat Republic is on the border of Mongolia in far eastern Soviet Asia, 1,200 miles from the Pacific. For years we were nomads, 300,000 of us. We roamed the pasture lands with our herds. Now we have learned to work with machinery and those of us who still are nomads roam only in summer and settle down in villages in winter. Today at Ulan Uday on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the Buryat Mongols have one of the great locomotive works of Soviet Asia. I am a Yakut and this is our village here at Yakutsk, 500 miles from the sea of Akhatsk. I learned all I know of mining from that Russian down there. In the mine, the blond-haired Russian from the Donetsk Basin directs the operations. Under the direction of experts like the men from the Donetsk Basin, great numbers of the Yakutsk have gotten to the mine. And great numbers of them have learned the Russian language as we have learned their language. That has been one of the amazing things out here, Mr. Zepionov. We learned their language, which is related to the Turkish family of languages in order to learn to live with them when we came out here so many years ago. And they learned Russian not only together long with us but so that they could speak with the people of the other sides, like the Gelyaks and the Samoyev and the Tungus. I noticed that even the Yakut children speak Russian. Russian is taught in the schools along with Yakut. And our newspapers are printed in both Yakut and Russian. And to encourage learning and culture, we have here in Yakutsk a library of 550,000 books. How different this must be from the place you came to 40 years ago. Yes, it is different. We have here in this outpost of Yakutsk just about everything every modern city has. Hospitals, a fire department, a radio station, museums, schools. But these are only the outward things, the things you see. What is behind them is what is important. And that is the people and their determination to be safe and strong. You have been listening to the Pacific Story, presented by the National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated independent stations as a public service to clarify events in the Pacific and to make understandable across currents of life in the Pacific Basin. For a reprint of this Pacific Story program, send 10 cents in stamps or coin to University of California Press, Berkeley, California. May I repeat? For a reprint of this Pacific Story program, send 10 cents in stamps or coin to University of California Press, Berkeley, California. The Pacific Story is written and directed by Arnold Marquess. The original musical score was composed and conducted by Thomas Paluso. Your narrator, Gain Whitman. Programs in this series of particular interest to servicemen and women are broadcast overseas through the worldwide facilities of the Armed Forces Radio Service. This program came to you from Hollywood. This is the National Broadcasting Company.