Day after day, the countryside rolled past. First, the endless, grassy steppes, then a dark wall of pine forest, broken by white-barked birches. Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign was in full swing, and the radio was full of patriotic stuff about settling the wilderness. Every few hundred kilometers, especially by rivers, raw and ugly new towns had sprung up along the Trans-Sib line. Pre-fab apartment blocks, mud streets, cement trucks, and giant sooty power plants. Trains unloaded huge spools of black wire. "Electrification" was another big propaganda theme of 1958.