PRESS RELEASE
Russian Magazine FORUM International Releases Special Issue on Bering Strait Project
June 6, 2007 (EIRNS)—FORUM International, a Moscow-based bilingual print publication, today released a special issue devoted to the project to link Eurasian and American infrastructure networks via a tunnel under the Bering Strait. The contents of the 80-page, color-illustrated magazine are centered on the proceedings of the Megaprojects of Russia's East international conference on "An Intercontinental Eurasia-America Transport Link Via The Bering Strait," held in Moscow on April 24 of this year. All of the transcripts and articles are published in both Russian and English.
FORUM International appears as the G-8 summit opens in Heiligendamm, Germany, amid persistent reports that Russia will raise the Bering Strait rail-road-energy project at that meeting. The magazine’s opening spread is the text of an Appeal from the April 24 conference participants, addressed to the heads of state of Russia, the USA, Canada, China, Korea, Japan, and the EU member countries, asking them to put the project on the G8 agenda and to push ahead with funding for its feasibility studies.
Like the April 24 conference, this issue of FORUM International has been sponsored by Council for the Study of Productive Forces, a Russian state research organization known by its Russian acronym, SOPS. It is a joint organization of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, and is headed by Academician Alexander G. Granberg. Included among the proceedings, published in FORUM International, is EIR founder Lyndon LaRouche’s contribution to the SOPS conference, titled, "The World’s Political Map Changes: Mendeleyev Would Have Agreed." It previously came out in EIR of May 4, 2007. LaRouche calls the Bering Strait project "the navel of a birth of a new world economy," as against the "impulse towards new world wars."
The theme of collaboration on great, mutually beneficial infrastructure projects as a means of war-avoidance runs throughout the special issue. It comes into focus in Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp LaRouche's testimony to June 2001 Russian State Duma hearings on "Measures to Ensure the Development of Russia's Economy under Conditions of Global Financial Destabilization," which has been included in this issue of FORUM International.
Presenting the link between economic depressions and war, Zepp LaRouche developed for her Russian audience, how the implementation of Dr. Wilhelm Lautenbach's program for productive employment could have ended the depression and prevented the Nazis' rise to power, had it been adopted in 1931. The Eurasian Land-Bridge today, she concluded, therefore gives the world's people a vision of hope that the 21st Century will be better than the 20th.
Former Alaska Governor Walter J. Hickel's April 24 conference speech is published in FORUM International under the headline "Mega Projects Would Be an Alternative to War." Academician Granberg, in his contribution to FORUM International, says that "multilateral infrastructure mega projects are the only real alternative to confrontation, including military confrontation, between nations and peoples." He calls the Bering Strait scheme "a project that may change the world, a project of joining creative energies, replacing missile defense systems with a territory of international cooperation."
Granberg is Russia's leading expert on regional development in northern latitudes, such as those of Siberia and the Russian Far East. His call to complete the Bering Strait connection by 2027, made during recent Moscow festivities to mark Prof. Stanislav Menshikov’s 80th birthday, was published in EIR of June 1, 2007. Boris Lapidus, senior vice-president of the state-owned company Russian Railways, writing about the job-creating potential of the trans-Bering Strait railway, says in his article, "The mutual benefit for Russia, the EU and the Asia-Pacific countries is the basis for cooperation in setting up transit corridors and makes it possible to combine national interests for the common good."
Other contributors of articles and interviews in the FORUM International special issue include board members of the non-profit Interhemispheric Bering Strait Rail and Tunnel Group, formed in 1991 to promote the project; Russian hydroelectric power executives who want to develop new capacities on Siberia's rivers; and members of the governments and legislatures of several eastern Russian regions. The cover of FORUM International #7 shows a photo of the Bering Strait as seen from outer space, with the prospective rail line between Alaska and Russia's Chukotka Region sketched in.
Among the many other maps in the issue are two historical items of strategic importance: an 1802 map of discoveries made by Russian navigators in the northern Pacific, and Governor of Colorado William Gilpin's, "American Economic, Just, and Correct Map of the World" from his 1890 book Compacting and Fusing Together All the World’s Continents.
Published in a print run of 4,000 copies, FORUM International #7 is made available here in pdf by permission of its editors, for personal use only and for no commercial purpose. Persons located in the Russian Federation may obtain a printed copy of the magazine by contacting the editors of FORUM International: olga.forum@km.ru, telephone +7 926 203 3382; or the Council for the Study of Productive Forces: 7 Vavilov St., 117997 Moscow, Russian Federation, telephone +7 495 135 0004.
