Industrial development in different parts of Russia varies tremendously. In the pre-Russian Revolution era before 1917, manufacturing industries were confined to the European part of Russia. It is only in the first half of the 20th century, through the various five year plans, that the vast territory of Asiatic U.S.S.R. has been gradually developed. Further development is still going on. Russian industries today are concentrated in four major areas, but 75 per cent of Russian industry is still within European Russia.
(a) The Moscow-Gorki Region: The oldest and greatest of Russian industrial regions include such cities and towns as Moscow (the national capital) Gorki, Tula, Yaroslavi and Ivanova. Moscow is noted for textiles, machinery, chemicals and light industries. But Gorki, Tula and the Moscow as whole have diverse industries, including heavy engineering, steel mills, railway equipment, automobiles, aircraft and food processing.
(b) The Urals Industrial Region: This is a comparatively new region that has only been developed since the Second World War. It is well endowed for heavy and metallurgical industries with many mineral resources close at hand. There are rich reserves of copper (in the central Urals and at Karabash), iron ore (Nizhni Tagil-Kushva, Magnitogorsk), chromium (Sarany, Khalilovo) as well as nickel, cobalt, manganese, vanadium, lead and zonczinc. There are very productive oil and gas fields around Ufa and Kuybyshev in the west and around Ural, Surgut and Nizhnevartovsk in the east. There are now many blast furnaces and steel mills, and metallurgical industries, heavy engineering and chemicals are also very important at towns such as Magnitogorsk, Pern-Chelyabinsk, Nizhni Tagil, Ufa and Sverdlovsk.
Heavy engineering and metallurgical industries dominate all other activities. Oil refineries and petrochemical plants at Perm, Ufa, Kuybyshev, Surgut and Tobolsk and hydro-electric power plants at Kame and Kuybyshev will further accelerate the growth of the southern Urals.
(c) The Kuzbas region located in the western part of Asiatic Russia, has extensive coal deposits in the Kuzbas coalfield as well as many large thermal plants and the hydroelectric power plant. Oil can be brought from the fields on the eastern side of the Urals around Tyumen, Surgut and Nizhnevartovsk. In Asiatic Russia there ate many minor industrial areas. There are some industries in the ancient towns of Central Asia such as Bokhara and Samarkand, including modern engineering some textiles and craft industries. There is also Industrial development in the Soviet part of Asia such as Vladivostok, Magadan and Khabarovsk based on minerals and timber from the interior.
Ukraine: This country is based on the rich Donetz or Donbas coalfield and the Krivoi Rog-Kerch iron field. It has all the mineral resources required for large-scale heavy engineering including large deposits of manganese from Nikopol and vanadium from Kerch.
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