SOVIET GAS PIPELINE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100640003-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 21, 2007
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: March 27, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO N REPORTS, ~N~.
ED BRADLEY: President Reagan recently fought a bitter
battle with the European allies over the new gas pipeline the
Soviets are building to Europe. The Europeans wanted the Soviet
gas. Reagan didn't want them to have it. Now some Europeans,
especially West Germans, are having second thoughts, themselves,
because they believe that the Soviets are using forced labor from
the Gulag, that network of prisons and labor camps administered
by the KGB, to build the pipeline.
This is where the pipeline begins, in the frozen wastes
of Western Siberia. Ten years ago, when the West was reeling
from the oil embargo and energy crisis, the Soviets hit the
jackpot here in the Orengoy region. They discovered the largest
natural gas reserves in the world.
Since then, the network of pipelines out of Orengoy has
been expanding. Now, in what they call the deal of the century,
the Soviets, in spite of President Reagan's opposition and with
the help of Western technology, are building a pipeline that will
earn them hard Western currency by carrying gas some 3000 miles
into West Germany.
And it will come out -here. This is Weidhaus (?), West
Germany, just across the border from Czechoslovakia. In 1984 gas
from the new Soviet pipeline will enter Germany and Western
Europe through this point. West Germany is already the Soviets'
biggest gas customer; and with the new pipeline, will double its
consumption.
But human rights activists are now saying that West
Germany should not buy the product of forced labor, should not
buy what they call Gulag gas.
OFFICES IN: WASHINGTON D.C. ? NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? DETROIT ? AND OTHER PRINCIPAL CITIES
Material supplied by Radio N Reports, Inc. may be used for file and reference purposes only. IT may not be reproduced, sold or publicly demonstrated or exhibited.
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DR. REINHARD GANOUCK: We see here a similar situation
as existed during the Second World War when the big chemical
factory I.C. Farben did employ prisoners from the concentration
camps in Auschwitz for production of chemical, whatever, pro-
ducts.
BRADLEY: Dr. Reinhard Ganouck is the President of
the International Society for Human Rights in Frankfurt.
DR. GANOUCK: This activities, using prisoners of
concentration camps for forced labor, was termed a crime against
humanity. And Albert Speer, who was a Minister of Industries, or
whatever, got 20 years in prison for that.
Who in Europe is going to be the next Albert Speer?
BRADLEY: The International Society for Human Rights is
an independently-financed organization which monitors human
rights abuse in both right- and left-wing regimes. In its
Russian Department, the evidence the society has collected from
former prisoners' letters and telephone calls is sufficient, it
claims, to prove that forced labor is being used on the pipeline.
Phone calls from the Soviet Union are tape-recorded. In
this one, a contact from Moscow listed the names of those
recently arrested for practicing their religious beliefs. She
says one of them, Vladimir Maroshkin, a member of the
Pentecostal Church, has been sent to work on the gas pipeline.
"Filthy lies" is what Tass, the Soviet news agency,
called the allegations of forced labor.
In an effort to counter these continuing reports, Soviet
authorities arranged a trip for Western reporters to get a first-
hand look at conditions on the pipeline. CBS News Moscow corres-
pondent Don McNeil went along.
DON MCNEIL: Nestled in the foothills of the Carpathian
Mountains, the campsite where the workers live looked clean and
suspiciously neat, by Russian standards.
BRADLEY: The site chosen for the visit by the Soviets
was at the southern end of the pipeline, a long way from Siberia.
No signs of forced labor were visible.
DR. CANOUCK: I would say that to conclude that Western
journalists did not see any prisoners there, to draw the
conclusion that the prisoners do not exist, that would just be
like, from the prisoners' side, because they never saw in
concentration camps any Western journalists, to conclude that
Western journalists do not exist.
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I would conclude they exist in different places.
BRADLEY: That forced labor exists in some places in the
Soviet Union has been well-documented, This film, shot secretly
in 1976 by Soviet dissidents, shows a labor camp in Soviet
Latvia.. Closely-guarded trucks ferry prisoners from a camp to a
construction site where they are building a factory.
How many prisoners are there in all? Estimates range as
high as seven million.
Professor Mikhail Vaslensky, an historian, was an
adviser to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party
before he defected to the West.
Could they build that pipeline without forced labor?
PROFESSOR MIKHAIL VASLENSKY: Yes, they can. I am sure
they can. But only it is cheaper with the forced labor. With
forced labor, it costs them nothing at all.
BRADLEY: According to Vaslensky, the use of forced
labor i.s not an abuse of power by the Soviet regime. It is a
fundamental part of the Soviet prison system.
PROFESSOR VASLENSKY: The penal law introduces not only,
as usually, as normal, the prisons, but the camps. And 99
percent of prisoners are in the camps. And all these camps are
just the sites of forced labor.
BRADLEY: Mahmed Kumagambetov, a native of Soviet
Asia, questioned his country's political system, and it cost him
17 years of his life, first in prison, then a labor camp, and
finally exile in Siberia. He now lives in Munich, where he
met his wife Natalie, a Russian by birth, who grew up in the
United States.
MAHMED KUMAGAMBETOV: First I worked on gas pipeline in
Megion.
BRADLEY: He showed us where he worked on several
pipelines in Siberia.
KUMAGAMBETOV: After that, I worked in Surgut. [Speaks
in Russian]
MRS. KUMAGAMBETOV: On a concrete construction plant.
In that plant, there worked 960 prisoners under strict regime.
Close to that plant there was a camp where the prisoners lived.
And every morning, all day long, they were being shuttled back
and forth from the plant to the camp and back again.
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BRADLEY: Mahmed Kumagambetov now works for the U.S.
Government-funded Radio Liberty, broadcasting to his homeland of
Kazakhstan. He says he saw forced labor being used on the Soviet
pipelines until he came to the West in 1979.
But what about the pipeline being built right now?
MRS. KUMACAMBETOV [translating]: The pipeline which is
being built right now does go thorugh Surgut. And at that time,
there was already work being performed in Surgut. It all belongs
to one large gas pipeline system. And there is nothing to the
contrary, There is nothing to say that they have introduced a law
that forced labor is not to be used.
BRADLEY: In 1981, when work started on the new gas
pipeline to Europe, the late President Leonid Brezhnev appealed
for 400,000 workers to go to Siberia. These pipeline volunteers
-- when Soviet television made this film they were called "Brave
Pioneers" -- were in short supply, even when they were offered
three times more than they could earn back in Moscow.
So, have the Soviets been using forced labor on this new
pipeline? According to Albina Yakarava, they have.
Albina Yakarava now lives in Munich with her two
children. Her husband is in a labor camp in the Soviet Union.
She was the founding member of an organization named SMUT (?), a
trade union movement banned by the Soviet authorities.
Last May in Leningrad, she says, she met three men who
told her that during the winter of 1981 and '82 they had been
forced to work on the gas pipeline.
We talked with her through an interpreter.
BRADLEY: Where are we talking about here?
She says her contacts told her they were organized into
brigades of around 30 or 40 near the towns of Tumin and Surgut in
Western Siberia. They then often worked as much as 600 miles
away in any direction.
TRANSLATOR: I do know about -these brigades that have
been formed in Tumin and Surgut. And according to what my
acquaintances told me, there were many brigades that had been
formed to be sent to work on the pipeline.
BRADLEY: West Germany has the largest community of
Russian exiles in Europe. Some of them have been here since the
Russian Revolution. And their concern for what's happening in
their homeland has touched a sensitive nerve in this country
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where they live because it is a reminder of the past. And in
Germany, the past is not a pleasant memory.
Just outside Munich is Dachau. Under the Nazis, it was
an infamous concentration camp and a center for forced labor.
Today Dachau is kept as a public memorial, a reminder of the
past. And each Sunday, as Germans visit Dachau, they must have
Mikhail Makarenko (?), former Soviet political prisoner, who
comes here to tell the somewhat bewildered Germans that the gas
they plan to use, the gas that will come through the new Soviet
pipeline, is also, he says, the product of forced labor.
For West Cermans, these allegations of forced labor
could not have come at a more unwelcomed time. Last month marked
the 50th anniversary of Hitler's rise to power. And in this bout
of national soul-searching, the Nazis' use of forced labor did
not escape attention.
DR. GANOUCK: We should heat our rooms with gas which is
slave gas, which is Gulag gas,. as we call it, which is coming out
from cooperation with a regime which is employing slave labor.
We cannot accept this.
I_hope you in the United States -- I think you do have
laws prohibiting the import of goods which are produced in slave
labor. Now, this is a true case of slave labor, and we cannot
accept these goods here in Germany. I don't want to have it in
my living room or my kitchen this gas; and I hope many people
feel the same.
BRADLEY: But West Germany needs to import two-thirds of
all of its energy needs, and it is the major European partner in
this gas deal with the Soviets. German banks have extended huge
loans to the Soviet Union. German workers have new jobs building
equipment for the pipeline.
This month's general elections kept the incumbents in
power. And it seems likely that the interests of German workers
will continue to be of more concern than the welfare of Soviet
workers.
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