Siberian State Holds Conference on Northern Eurasian Infrastructure and Bering Strait Crossing

PRESS RELEASE

Siberian State Holds Conference
on Northern Eurasian Infrastructure
and Bering Strait Crossing

Aug. 19, 2011 (EIRNS)—This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee.

A three-day conference, Comprehensive Infrastructure Development in Northeast Russia: from Limitations to Growth, opened Aug. 17 in the East Siberian city of Yakutsk. The event is being hosted by the government of the Sakha Republic/Yakutia, with sponsorship by Russia's Council for the Study of Productive Forces (SOPS) and Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The SOPS, a joint organization of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the country's Ministry of Economics, has its roots in Academician Vladimir Vernadsky's KEPS organization of 1915-1930. The SOPS was formerly headed by the late Academician Alexander Granberg, a specialist in regional development projects who vigorously advocated building a tunnel across the Bering Strait, until his death last year (see EIR, Sept. 3, 2010), and an endorser of the November 2009 call to Put the LaRouche Plan to Save the World Economy on the International Agenda.

Dr. Victor Razbegin, acting head of the SOPS, told a pre-event press conference in Moscow August 12 that the Yakutsk conference will have a sub-event to discuss prospects for creating a multimodal corridor between Eurasia and America, as well as a Chamber of Commerce and Industry business summit for Arctic regions. Razbegin, who spoke about the Bering Strait a.project at the April 2007 Moscow conference on Megaprojects of Russia's East, which also featured Lyndon LaRouche's paper, Mendeleyev Would Have Approved, and sent a paper to the Schiller Institute's September 2007 event in Germany, The Eurasian Land-Bridge Becomes a Reality, said at the press conference:

"The only link that remains before the continents are connected, is 4000 km in Russia and 2000 km in Alaska and Canada, so this is a key, pivotal project for developing the entire infrastructure of our Northeast. The project is for building an integrated main line, not only a railroad, but a highway and an electric power transmission line, linking the power grids of the continents. After we build this segment, four out of six continents will be interlinked by these systems."

Gennadi Alexeyev, a Sakha Republic government official, said that his diamond-rich region wants to co-finance the project, especially if the Russian federal budget falls short. The regional SakhaNews agency has been giving extensive coverage to the conference, as has Gudok, the Russian Railways newspaper. Russian Railways CEO Vladimir Yakunin is another expected participant in the event. Gudok of August 8 interviewed Fyodor Pekhterev of the Institute of Transport Economics and Development on how the Russian Railways line to Yakutsk, then on to Magadan and the Bering Strait coast of Chukhotka, will link to Alaska.