People want to know more, to know more thoroughly, to know more authentically. This is a sign of the times. Where to obtain knowledge of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics a country that has made a spectacular passage from a tortuous past to a radiant present?

Books of the Impressions of the USSR series put out by Progress Publishers offer many an interesting account of the fast advancing Soviet society. Authors published in this series are eyewitnesses in the sense that they have all visited the Soviet Union and have seen life there at first hand. Theirs is an unbiased story about the men and women who so rapidly transformed Russia of the tsars into one of the world’s most advanced countries. Books of this series deal with a variety of topics concerning the swiftly growing Soviet society that is building communism.

To write this story of Siberia’s amazing development, achievements in desert reclamation projects and space exploration, the author travelled extensively about the Soviet Union, talking to workers and scientists, cosmonauts, and it is through their eyes that he describes the transformation of the country. Specifically, it is, he says, the first time in history that a frontier has been opened and developed according to a plan, equipping the enthusiasm o f youth with modern decimating its native peoples. Drawing on his own earlier experience in the Canadian north, the author interweaves past and present, from exploration to the space age, to give readers abroad a view of what he regards as a great socialist success, profound in its implications for peace and progress.

Canadian writer, poet and historian, Harold Griffin has been an editor and journalist for half a century, leavened by work as a gold miner and fisherman during the depression years.

Starting as a cub reporter in his native London at the age o f 15, he left Fleet Street three years later to emigrate to Canada, where he worked on daily newspapers and entered the labor movement as editor of labor weeklies. For many years he was editor of the Pacific Tribune and, more recently, The Fisherman, which speaks for the United Fisherman and Allied Workers Union, in which he now holds life membership, the union’s highest honor.

He is the author o f three works on Canadian history and contemporary affairs and three books of poetry, which have been translated into several languages. In addition to his travels through Siberia and to Turkmenia in the fall of 1980 to gather material for this book, he has made three previous visits to the USSR as a guest of the Union of Soviet Writers.

You can get the book here and here

Cleaned, optimised scan of  orginal scan
> A 1982 (second printing 1984) work published in the USSR. Scanned by Ismail, sent to him by Misdreavus.
From Thomas Mrett’s Archive collection.

Contents
Chapter I. From the Yukon to Siberia 5
Chapter II. Oil from the Muskeg 19
Chapter III. Novosibirsk: Siberian Metropolis 34
Chapter IV. Old Siberians and New 52
Chapter V. Milk and Meat 66
Chapter VI. River Diversion: The Great Debate 81
Chapter VII. New Cities in the Taiga 98
Chapter VIII. Storehouse of Riches 111
Chapter IX. Railway to the Future 124
Chapter X. Socialist Rebirth 137
Chapter XI. Dam in the Permafrost 159
Chapter XII. Ashkhabad: City of Love 175
Chapter XIII. Where Water Is Life 188
Chapter XIV. Man’s Destiny Is Space 202