ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to examine the problems and future prospects for the Soviet iron-ore, pig iron, and steel industries, focusing primarily on iron-ore. It provides a concise history of prerevolutionary Russian and Soviet iron-ore exploration and exploitation. The chapter discusses the central role that Soviet ferrous metallurgy has played in regional and national economic planning since the very beginning of the "forced industrialization campaign" in 1928. It focuses on trends in the Soviet iron-ore industry and investigates the regional distribution of ore reserves, and the geographic patterns of ore production. Since the beginning of central planning in 1928 Soviet economic development policies can be divided temporally into a Stalinist "political" period and a post-Stalin "economic" period. Except for the severe disruption created by World War II, Soviet crude and marketable iron-ore output increased without interruption until the middle 1970s.
