Transport in Western Siberia: Tsarist and Soviet Development. By Robert N. North. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press and the Centre for Transportation Studies, 1979. xii, 364 pp. Illustrations. $22.00.

Abstract

Amidst a decade of literature focused on the Baikal-Amur Mainline, the appearance of a publication addressing a different facet of Siberian transportation is refreshing. Robert North presents the history of economic development in western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan and the role of those regions in the tsarist Russian and Soviet economies. He utilizes information on the development of transportation facilities, traffic flows, and transport policies to analyze changing spatial relationships in the west Siberian economy. The nine-chapter book includes a fifty-page appendix of maps and tables and an extensive bibliography of pre-1975 sources. The substantive portions of the book (chapters 2-8) center on the occurrences that have most influenced west Siberian growth. Chronologically, these include initial Russian settlement and development of the fur industry, construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, development of the Ural-Kuznetsk Combine, the wartime relocation of industry to Siberia, the Virgin Lands program, and the discovery and subsequent development of oil in the middle Ob' region. These segments are informative, complete, and thoroughly researched. In the first and last chapters, the author analytically combines these individual stages, searching for a coherent underlying process or pattern to west Siberian development. The first chapter outlines the conceptual bases of several Western regional development models, notably the export base model and Gunnar Myrdal's core-periphery formulation. The last chapter analyzes the overall goodness of fit between these models and the actual west Siberian development sequence. North concludes that none of the Western models adequately explains the pattern of Siberian growth. The author acknowledges that the allocative role of the central government nullifies the assumption of retained income generation upon which growth is based, in, for example, the export base formulation (p. 235). In this section the author might have included several of the more relevant Soviet frameworks of regional analysis such as those of N. N. Nekrasov, A. G. Aganbegian, M. K. Bandman, or A. G. Granberg. These models explicitly take into account the centralization of economic activity and therefore might better reflect the Soviet experience than do Western models. Exclusion from the analysis of these main actors and their respective institutions (the Council for the Study of Productive Forces [SOPS] and the Institute of Economics and Organization of Industrial Production of the Siberian Academy of Science [IEOPP SO ANSSSR]) also weakens the author's discussion of the continuing debate over Siberian development. Members of these institutions constitute an important, if not dominant, component of the pro-Siberian lobby. Methods of regional analysis employed by these groups, including interregional linear programming and input-output models, have been instrumental in bringing to the surface the positive aspects of Siberian development. Failure to refer to these components causes much of the...